He has won numerous prizes for his research, his teaching, and his books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate, The Better Angels of Our Nature, The Sense of Style, and Enlightenment Now. Currently Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard, he has also taught at Stanford and MIT.

He grew up in Montreal and earned his BA from McGill and his PhD from Harvard. Steven Pinker is an experimental psychologist who conducts research in visual cognition, psycholinguistics, and social relations. It leads to better choices in our lives and in the public sphere, and is the ultimate driver of social justice and moral progress. Collective rationality depends on norms that are designed to promote objectivity and truth. Also, the rational pursuit of self-interest, sectarian solidarity, and uplifting mythology by individuals can add up to crippling irrationality in a society. Instead, we think in ways that are sensible in the low-tech contexts in which we spend most of our lives, but fail to take advantage of the powerful tools of reasoning our best thinkers have discovered over the millennia: logic, critical thinking, probability, correlation and causation, and optimal ways to update beliefs and commit to choices individually and with others. After all, we discovered the laws of nature, lengthened and enriched our lives, and discovered the benchmarks for rationality itself. Why do we find ourselves flooded with fake news, medical quackery, conspiracy theorizing, and “post- truth” rhetoric? It can’t be that humans are just an irrational species - cavemen out of time saddled with biases, fallacies, and illusions. Today, humanity is reaching new heights of scientific understanding-and at the same time appears to be losing its mind.

Pinker rationality