Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. An experimental cognitive psychologist and popular writer on language, mind, and human nature, he was born in Montreal and earned his bachelor's degree in Psychology from McGill University in 1976 and his PhD in Experimental Psychology from Harvard University in 1979. Pinker's academic career spans prestigious institutions: he held assistant professor positions in Psychology at Harvard (1980-1981) and Stanford University (1981-1982), followed by appointments at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, including Assistant Professor (1982-1985), Associate Professor (1985-1989), Professor (1989-2000), and Peter de Florez Professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences (2000-2003). He returned to Harvard in 2003 as Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology and served as Harvard College Professor from 2008 to 2013.

Pinker's research focuses on vision, language, social relations, communication and common knowledge, historical and recent trends in violence, psycho-linguistics of good writing, the critical period for language acquisition, neurobiology and genetics of language, and regular and irregular phenomena in grammar. His work has garnered prizes from the National Academy of Sciences (Troland Research Award, 1993), Royal Institution of Great Britain (Henry Dale Prize, 2004), Cognitive Neuroscience Society (George A. Miller Prize, 2010), American Psychological Association (Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution, 1984; William James Book Prize for multiple books), and Association for Psychological Science (William James Fellow Award, 2016). He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences (2016), has received over ten honorary doctorates, including from McGill University (1999) and the University of Reading (2017), and numerous book awards for titles such as The Language Instinct (1994), How the Mind Works (1997), The Blank Slate (2002), The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011), and The Sense of Style (2014). Pinker chairs the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary, writes for The New York Times and Time, and has been recognized as Humanist of the Year (2006), in Foreign Policy’s 100 Global Thinkers, and Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World Today. His scholarship has shaped cognitive science, psycholinguistics, and evolutionary psychology.

Professional Email: pinker@wjh.harvard.edu