Steven Pinker
The rules of friendship are tacit, unconscious; they are not rational. In business, though, you have to think rationally.Collection: Friendship
Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language.Collection: Poetry
Reading is a technology for perspective-taking. When someone else's thoughts are in your head, you are observing the world from that person's vantage point.Collection: Technology
Part of the bargain of being alive is that one takes a chance at dying a premature or painful death, be it from violence, accident, or disease.Collection: Chance
I suspect music is auditory cheesecake, an exquisite confection crafted to tickle the sensitive spots of... our mental faculties.Collection: Music
Most wars are not fought over shortages of resources such as food and water, but rather over conquest, revenge, and ideology.Collection: Food
Human nature is complex. Even if we do have inclinations toward violence, we also have inclination to empathy, to cooperation, to self-control.Collection: Nature
Northeastern and most coastal states will vote for the candidate who is more closely aligned with international cooperation and engagement, secularism and science, gun control, individual freedom in culture and sexuality, and a greater role for the government in protecting the environment and ensuring economic equality.Collection: Equality
As many political writers have pointed out, commitment to political equality is not an empirical claim that people are clones.Collection: Equality
My worst boss was a departmental chair who never learned to appreciate new developments in the field. He had contempt for students and younger researchers, and he saw the job of running the department as a nuisance.
I teach classes 28 weeks of the year, but the rest of the time I do research and write books. While I'm writing a book, which I probably do two out of every three years, it's like having a second job. I squeeze in the hours when I can.
I'm very interested in language because it reflects our obsessions and ways of conceptualising the world.
Roads, better harnesses for horses, time-keeping devices, financial instruments like a currency that was recognized everywhere in the kingdom, enforceable contracts - all of this made commerce more appealing than plunder.
There is a correlation between economic inequality and personal violence. The explanation for the correlation isn't completely clear; there are a number of possibilities.
The art of photography is all about directing the attention of the viewer.
Equity feminism is a moral doctrine about equal treatment that makes no commitments regarding open empirical issues in psychology or biology.
Photography is a kind of virtual reality, and it helps if you can create the illusion of being in an interesting world.
With violence, as with so many other concerns, human nature is the problem, but human nature is also the solution.
I don't consider myself to be that radical a thinker.
My opinions about human nature are shared by many psychologists, linguists, and biologists, not to mention philosophers and scholars going back centuries.
The connections I draw between human nature and political systems in my new book, for example, were prefigured in the debates during the Enlightenment and during the framing of the American Constitution.
People today sometimes get uncomfortable with empirical claims that seem to clash with their political assumptions, often because they haven't given much thought to the connections.
Why are empirical questions about how the mind works so weighted down with political and moral and emotional baggage?
Why do people believe that there are dangerous implications of the idea that the mind is a product of the brain, that the brain is organized in part by the genome, and that the genome was shaped by natural selection?
By exploring the political and moral colorings of discoveries about what makes us tick, we can have a more honest science and a less fearful intellectual milieu.
Parents provide their children with genes as well as an environment, so the fact that talkative parents have kids with good language skills could simply mean that and that the same genes that make parents talkative make children articulate.
But in most cases even the possibility that the correlations reflect shared genes is taboo.
Most intellectuals today have a phobia of any explanation of the mind that invokes genetics.
The great appeal of the doctrine that the mind is a blank slate is the simple mathematical fact that zero equals zero.
There has to be innate circuitry that does the learning, that creates the culture, that acquires the culture, and that responds to socialization.
But the newest research is showing that many properties of the brain are genetically organized, and don't depend on information coming in from the senses.
So no, it's not all in the genes, but what isn't in the genes isn't in the family environment either. It can't be explained in terms of the overall personalities or the child-rearing practices of parents.
I think this confusion leads intellectuals and artists themselves to believe that the elite arts and humanities are a kind of higher, exalted form of human endeavor.
As individual people, embedded in our daily lives, of course we're interested in what makes one person different from another. We've got to hire one person and not another, marry one person and not another.
An eye for beauty locks onto faces that show signs of health and fertility - just as one would predict if it had evolved to help the beholder find the fittest mate.
We're living in primate heaven. We're warm, dry, we're not hungry, we don't have fleas and ticks and infections. So why are we so miserable?
Consciousness surely does not depend on language. Babies, many animals, and patients robbed of speech by brain damage are not insensate robots; they have reactions like ours that indicate that someone's home.
Consciousness turns out to consist of a maelstrom of events distributed across the brain. These events compete for attention, and as one process outshouts the others, the brain rationalizes the outcome after the fact and concocts the impression that a single self was in charge all along.
As every student in Philosophy 101 learns, nothing can force me to believe that anyone except me is conscious. This power to deny that other people have feelings is not just an academic exercise but an all-too-common vice, as we see in the long history of human cruelty.
There's a common criticism of evolutionary psychology that it's fatalistic and it dooms us to eternal strife, 'Why even try to work toward peace if we're just bloody killer apes and violence is in our genes?'
If you give people literacy, bad ideas can be attacked and experiments tried, and lessons will accumulate.
One of the perks of being a psychologist is access to tools that allow you to carry out the injunction to know thyself.
Like the early days of the Internet, the dawn of personal genomics promises benefits and pitfalls that no one can foresee.
Of course, genes can't pull the levers of our behavior directly. But they affect the wiring and workings of the brain, and the brain is the seat of our drives, temperaments and patterns of thought.
No one knows what the nongenetic causes of individuality are. Perhaps people are shaped by modifications of genes that take place after conception, or by haphazard fluctuations in the chemical soup in the womb or the wiring up of the brain or the expression of the genes themselves.
Obviously no language is innate. Take any kid from any race, bring them up in any culture and they will learn the language equally quickly. So no particular language is in the genes. But what might be in the genes is the ability to acquire language.
Whenever you speak to someone, you are presuming the two of you have a certain degree of familiarity - which your words might alter. So every sentence has to do two things at once: convey a message and continue to negotiate that relationship.
Words let us say the things we want to say and also things we would be better off not having said. They let us know the things we need to know, and also things we wish we didn't.
All our behaviours are a result of neurophysiological activity in the brain. There is no reason to believe there is any magic going on.
The idea that children are passive repositories to be shaped by their parents has been massively overstated. A child's peer group is a far greater determinant of its development and achievements than parental aspiration.