Sally Satel: I met Steven Pinker in around
2002 when he came to the American Enterprise Institute, which is where I work, to talk
about The Blank Slate. Clearly, his reputation had preceded him because he's one of the best
known psychologists both within the profession and also outside. And we've been friends since
and I have come to enjoy and deeply admire his dazzling intellect and also what a lovely
person he is. Steve Pinker did his undergraduate work at
McGill and then got a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology at Harvard. He went to Stanford as an assistant
professor, then to MIT for 21 years, and in 2000, mid-2000s, back to Harvard as the Johnstone
Family Professor. The breadth and depth of his work is quite
astounding. His scholarship and empirical research has ranged from mental imagery to
shape recognition, visual attention, children's language acquisition, the neural bases of
grammar and words, the psychology of cursing and the decline of violence, and how to write
well. He's authored seven popular books beginning in 1994 with The Language Instinct, then How
the Mind Works, Words and Rules, The Blank Slate, The Stuff of Thought, The Better Angels
of Our Nature, and his latest and seventh, The Sense of Style. And two of those books
were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. Finally, he is steeped in much deserved recognition
in spite of or maybe because of the taboos that he's been willing to take on. He's won
awards from the American Psychological Association, the National Academy of Sciences, the American
Humanist Association, among others. In 2004, he was named one of Times's most influential
thinkers or people in the world, and then also by Foreign Policy and Prospect, one of
the top 100 public intellectuals, and also by Foreign Policy, one of the top global thinkers.
And next year from this organization, the Association of Psychological Science, he will
be awarded the William James Fellow Award. So, let's get started by asking you, how did
you get to be Steve Pinker with respect to your parents, your upbringing, and your early
years in general? Steven Pinker: You wouldn't think that would
be a complicated question but one of the blessings or curses of being a psychologist is you can't
even take a question like that at face value because I don't think anyone has any idea
what made them who they are. One thing where our retrospective accounts of our childhood
have to leave out are many of the most important things that make us who we are starting with
the genes. Hans Eysenck, the great psychologist, said that the greatest influence that parents
have on their children is at the moment of conception, and we know that the research
since then has born him out. Unless you have an identical twin who was
separated at birth from you, you have no idea what the influence of genes is on your intellect
or your temperament. Unless you have someone who is adopted into your family at the same
time as you who is not biologically related, you have no idea what the influence of your
parents are and we have reason to believe from a lot of behavior genetic studies that
the effects of parents are overrated because adopted siblings by the time they are adults
correlate very poorly, close to zero, in intellect and personality. And unless you grow up with
an identical twin who shares both your heredity and your environment and you see differences
from your identical twin, you don't have any way of appreciating the role of chance. And
I think there is an enormous and under-appreciated role of sheer randomness in making us who
we are, just randomness in how the axons twist and turn when the brain develops and little
accidents that happen to you as you grow up that might shift you on one or another path
that you have no way of reconstructing. So, take with a grain of salt anything that I
say from now on because I don't think any of us has any idea what made us who we are.
But I'll start. I chose my parents well. My father, Harry Pinker, who I lost just
a few weeks ago, and my mother, Roslyn Pinker, both highly verbal, talented in math. My mother,
Roslyn Pinker, is highly intellectual and verbal, and I certainly grew up in a house
filled with conversation. It was a secular Jewish household so there was a lot of debate
and disputation. There's an old saying, "10 Jews, 11 political parties."
There were books and magazines and newspapers in the house when I was a teenager. My mother
gave me as a gift a subscription to the Time Life Science Series where every month a different
volume would come in on a different scientific topic: electricity and magnetism, light and
the planets and forests. But one month it was the mind, and I do remember being quite
intrigued by that Time Life volume and perhaps that more than anything led me to appreciate
psychology as an interesting thing to do. On the other hand, when I was at Stanford
my officemate was my friend, Herb Clark, also a professor of psychology interested in psychology
of language. He grew up in Deadwood Gulch, South Dakota. So, this is a good reason to
take with a grain of salt anything that attributes your professional interest to the neighborhood
in which you grew up. Sally Satel: You said that at 13 you were
even interested in human nature yet your early work was on vision. How did that came about
and what was one of your first projects? Steven Pinker: I think another thing that
I'd like to think influenced my interest was growing up in the '60s. I was a baby boomer.
And in the '60s you have to decide whether you're going to be an anarchist or a Marxist
or Ayn Randian or -- everything was very ideological. And those ultimately boiled down to questions
about human nature. If you're an anarchist, you must have a fairly rosy view of human
nature to think that people can co-exist without a Leviathan to keep them from each other's
throats, and so it is for the other political ideologies. So, I do remember having debates
with friends over whether people would -- whether we need money or people would just naturally
take their fair share, whether we need police or people would naturally cooperate -- but
you can't get an undergraduate degree in human nature. So, you have to pick a discipline
and psychology seemed to me a sweet spot between grappling with big, important, consequential
ideas but doing so in a way that was tractable, that you could study it in a lab.
I found myself gravitating to Steve Kosslyn, who had just been hired at Harvard when I
was a graduate student, and Steve has been a friend ever since. He was just six years
older than me at that time -- he was 28, I was 22 -- but he was building a research program
on visual imagery and visual cognition. Both of us were I think entranced by an idea that
has governed my work ever since, the idea that there is an important level of understanding
for psychology in between the world of common sense explanation, like, "I went to the fridge
because I was thirsty and I wanted a Coke," or "I'm going to vote for Hillary because
I like her record on foreign policy," kind of content of everyday conversation of ideas
and meaning and the level of neurophysiology, and that level is computation, that is that
thinking is a form of information processing, that knowledge is a form of information, that
motives and desires are cybernetic feedback mechanisms, and that that is the level at
which you can have a scientific psychology that is neither reduces to common sense nor
goes down to the level of neurons and neurotransmitters, and that there are many laws of thought and
emotion that can best be framed at that level. Steve at that time was doing that for mental
imagery, for the ability to form mental pictures to answer questions like, what shape are Mickey
Mouse's ears. Most people say, "Well, I never really thought about that, but, okay, oh yeah,
they're round," or how do I arrange the suitcases to fit into a trunk or if I'm writing a novel
or telling a story, how do people enter and leave the room, all the kinds of things we
conjure up in our mind's eye. But what does that mean? And Steve I think was the first
to come up with a computational theory of what it could mean to think in pictures or
images. And at that time this was thought by a lot of people to be a mistake.
This was the era before there was affordable computer graphics, where computation meant
you would type strings of text into a computer and you'd get strings back, and no one could
even conceive of what it would mean to have a picture. And a lot of bad philosophy was
mustered to show that this was paradoxical, "Oh, if there was a picture in the head, you'd
need a little man to look at the picture and then you'd need an even smaller picture inside
the head of the little man," or to say you have a mental image is all a category mistake,
it's like saying "for Pete's sake" and then walking around looking for Pete. So, all these
I think in retrospect bogus arguments as to why mental imagery was incoherent. And Steve
had an intuition that the notion of what we would today call graphics -- namely, you could
have a representation consisting of what we now call pixels -- I don't even know if the
word existed in that time -- and a more abstract, kind of web-like database from which the images
could be generated piece by piece, could account for our ability to form and use images.
There was one note in one of his papers that I read as a graduate student that I realized
opened up a whole world of questions where namely, how do you represent a third dimension
in an image. And we clearly can imagine three dimensional shapes when you take organic chemistry
or for that matter when you study the brain and you have to kind of mentally rotate it
and see it from different angles or approach it from the inside. The third dimension has
to be there but it can't just be adding layers of depth - that is make it a set of voxels,
as we'd now call them, volume elements instead of pixels, because then you wouldn't get perspective.
And when you form an image, if you imagine standing between railroad tracks, they converge,
which the voxels don't in the 3D representation and things get smaller as they move away.
And trying to resolve that paradox of how an information representation of a space could
have both the third dimension and have the effects of a vantage point in perspective
was what set me off of my thesis. Sally Satel: Wow. That sounds actually incredibly
complicated. So, how did you get from that to language acquisition?
Steven Pinker: So, I had to be opportunistic as a graduate student. Harvard at that time
actually had very few cognitive psychologists. They didn't give tenure to any of their cognitive
psychologists. They thought it was a passing fad, that only mathematical psychology was
true science. And so, I went after the only cognitive science that was actually happening
there which was language development in children. Roger Brown, the great social psychologist
and founder of psycholinguistics, was one of the faculty. And staying with the key idea
that psychology is best understood as a form of computation, I tried to think of what would
be the algorithm that a child would be born with that would take sentences as input, the
kind of things you'd hear from your parents and your siblings and your friends, and produce
as output, the ability to speak English or Japanese or Swahili or any other language.
So, what goes into that black box? And I started off more as a theoretician - namely, what could
the child be born with that would allow him to do that learning? And then that led to
a number of questions in more concrete areas of grammar -- how does the child learn endings
on verbs and nouns, meaning of words, how to flip the subject and auxiliary to pose
a question? And so, it was really theoretically driven.
Sally Satel: So, okay. This was the '80s, around the '80s and early '90s.
Steven Pinker: Yeah. Sally Satel: How is it that you didn't get
sort of swept up into the neuroscience world? I mean, PET came out in the '80s and then
fMRI in the '90s, and it's certainly been enormously attractive to many folks but you
stayed at a different level. Steven Pinker: Yes. I am a psychologist. I
have done a number of studies in collaboration with others with using cognitive neuroscience
techniques. I am an author on one fMRI paper, one paper looking at patients with focal lesions
and with degenerative diseases, and a third paper where we collaborated with neurosurgeons
who actually implanted electrodes that impale the brain and grids that sit on the surface
of the brain, not to satisfy their curiosity but to treat and diagnose epilepsy. And fortunately,
these patients kind of sitting around, waiting to have a seizure were all too happy to relieve
their boredom by taking some psycholinguistics experimental procedures.
But aside from those forays, I have remained a psychologist, I'm not a neuroscientist.
And partly when I was an undergraduate and I did help out in the neuroscience lab, I
realized I should not pick a career that depended in any way on my manual dexterity. I missed
the dentate gyrus by a mile and I realized --
Sally Satel: So, you got somebody else's -- Steven Pinker: Yeah. So, anything that involved
surgery was not for me. But also I really do believe -- and this is a belief we share,
you have a book with Scott Lilienfeld called Brainwashed on mindless neuroscience -- that
a lot of insight, depth, explanation, understanding of human behavior, thought, emotion is not
to be found at the level of neurophysiology but at a higher level of analysis, and for
me that would be at the level of information processing.
Sally Satel: So, your book, The Language Instinct in 1994, obviously took you out of the lab,
which was certainly a cloistered environment, and brought you into the public. Why did you
decide to write a book about language for the public?
Steven Pinker: It was a combination of things. I was an avid consumer of books by scientists
for a wider readership: Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins, Martin Gardner for mathematics,
George Gamow, Isaac Asimov, but no one had really done that for psychology, at least
for cognitive psychology, for language and thought. And when I would tell people what
I did for a living, the reaction would always be, "Wow, that's really interesting," and
I thought there really is a niche for a kind of Stephen Jay Gould-style book explaining
our science at a high level for a wide readership. And then, I'd written two books that are,
as they say about the Veg-O-Matic, not sold in stores. These were university press books,
highly technical books on language. But one of the editors at MIT Press said -- and I
paraphrase here -- "For an academic, your writing doesn't suck," and said, "Have you
ever thought of trying your hand at writing for a wider audience," and that's what led
me to do The Language Instinct. Sally Satel: And talk a little bit about the
transition from again being an academic, which you still are of course, but into being finally
a culture warrior. Steven Pinker: Well, I've often -- and I think
most people do that as their career meanders, but you get feedback from the world as to
what the world finds most interesting about the various things that you do or could do.
When my research activities -- when I changed the ratio in my portfolio from kind of 50/50
visual cognition and language to more and more language, it was in response to my seeing
that people were just much more interested in the work that I did in language. I got
more invitations to write book chapters and give talks and so on, and so I shifted the
mixture there. And then, likewise as I started to write about topics of interest to the wider
public, the wider public seem to want more and that too shifted the ratio.
Sally Satel: What was the reception to your early book? Were there critics
of it? Steven Pinker: Well, The Language Instinct
in particular, my first book for a wide audience, got almost entirely positive reviews -- the last time that I enjoyed that blessed state. And I was surprised
I was told by friends and colleagues who had written books for a wider audience, the typical
book will be in the bookstores -- a bookstore by the way is this building where they have
shelves -- and then gone forever. And I wrote it with that in mind. I had no
idea that it would still be in print two dozen years later, that it would be reviewed in
The New York Times. So, I walked into it with low expectations. And when it was widely reviewed
and widely noticed, I was surprised and delighted and it didn't strike that many people as controversial.
I think I got one negative review from -- because the book touched on some controversies within
the field of psycholinguistics and in one of the academic journals there was a fairly
critical review, but the others, both in the popular press and the other academic journal
reviews were highly positive. Sally Satel: Great. Well, speaking of the
critics, I have a list here of people with whom you've had friendly and maybe a little
bit sometimes tense academic debates. So, I'm going to read this list. And it's
a long list. I think I left some people out actually but, okay. So, one with Noam Chomsky
on the role of natural selection and the origin of language and even the very purpose of language. You seem to have an interesting theory about that; Jerry Fodor about how the mind works;
a debate with Elizabeth Spelke on the social and evolutionary basis of sex differences
in cognition; Stephen Jay Gould and Steven Rose on the evolutionary grounding of human
behavior and anxiety about biological determinism; John Gray -- he's a philosopher, right -- who
excoriated you as a defender of the enlightenment values -- how dare you -- while arguing for
a declinist view of civilization (he was. you were far more optimistic) in The Better
Angels of Our Nature; then Leon Kass, who actually is a colleague of mine at the American
Enterprise Institute -- well, I admit I sided with Professor Pinker on this, but arguing
about the very concept of human dignity and bioethics. This was in the context of The
President's Council On Bioethics under President George Bush with respect to stem cell research,
and Steven wrote this wonderful article, in The New Republic related to that and also
testified before their commission questioning the concept of -- not the concept of human
dignity but its context in stem cell research. And also Leon Wieseltier, who's the former
literary editor of The New Republic, on the relationship between science and the humanities.
So, I guess my question is, which of those was the most sort of productive, and
how? Steven Pinker: Well, I like to think that
I learned from all of them, that again as psychologists we're blessed or cursed with
the knowledge that most of our knowledge isn't, that we overestimate how correct we are and
how wise we are, how much we know, and that you really can only understand something if
you have it attacked and then have to reconstruct what's defensible. So, I think I learned from
all of them. I think I was right with all of them but I would, wouldn't I?
Sally Satel: Is there one that -- I guess I'm trying to tease out -- which one was the most protracted? I mean,
they play out in magazines, they play out on panels.
Steven Pinker: Yeah. You know, I think the -- certainly the debate on the whether the
human mind is a blank slate. It goes back to the empiricists and rationalists of the
17th Century. I do think we're making progress in it. Of course, it's not
either/or, nor is it some percentage between zero and 100 percent, but each has a different
role to play in the causal chain from genome to developing brain interacting with input
from the senses resulting in further learning and so on, so I think we're getting better
at sketching up the causal chain. But I think the general framework of the role
of evolution and genetics in human psychology, which I played out with Steve Gould and Steven
Rose and Richard Lewontin and in a different way with Noam Chomsky and Jerry Fodor, even,
though both of them are much more strongly on the nature side than I am because they
both in their own ways have allergies to the idea of Darwinian natural selection as the
sources of the nature part, that put into sharp light what the nature of our innate
endowment is, where it came from and what we should expect it to look like.
Sally Satel: Actually, speaking of endowment and maybe also worldviews, I mean I think
this is why you were so welcomed at AEI, frankly, as we have kind of a tragic view as opposed
to a utopian view and also the sense of -- I mean, there is a deep connection between ideas,
I believe, of innateness and personal responsibility, which is to say that you're not completely
at the mercy of your environment, that you are a determining being. But in that context,
I know that a political philosopher named Thomas Sowell has had a role in your work.
Can you describe that? Steven Pinker: Yeah. Thomas Sowell was trained
as an economist. He's at Stanford at the Hoover Institution but he has written on an astonishing
range of topics including the one that led him to contact me. He wrote a book
on language delay inspired by the fact that his own son was pretty much mute until the
age of four but highly talented in other spheres of cognition. He tells a story of the boy knocking
over a chessboard that Tom himself was in the midst of playing remotely and that Tom
got mad at him and whereupon the two-year-old boy put every chess piece back in its exact
place. So, there's clearly an uneven intellectual development -- no language but highly advanced
spatial cognition. And so, Tom wrote a book on language delay not from the point of view
of psycholinguist but consulting me for comments. And I had known about his widespread writing
in economics, in culture, in history, and that began a friendship that
included -- we're both photography nerds and both interested in human nature.
I think Tom is truly brilliant and underappreciated in large part because, as you kind of hinted
without saying in so many words, he is very strongly on the political right, I am not
strongly on the political right or on the political left, but one I think recurring
lesson in my own intellectual autobiography is that it's a real mistake to pick either
to be when you're inspired by someone to buy the entire inventory of ideas, I think you
have to pick and choose. I've also taken important lessons from Noam Chomsky who is as far to
the left, farther to the left than Tom Sowell is to the right. Everyone has interesting
ideas. You can't be a dittohead and swallow the entire agenda.
In Tom's case, aside from his book on late talking children and his work on economics,
he wrote a fascinating book called A Conflict of Visions on why the various left-wing opinions
should hang together and why the various right-wing opinions should hang together, which you wouldn't
necessarily, just looking at the list, casually think would have any underlying intellectual
coherence. So, if you ask someone, "Are you in favor of the death penalty," chances are
they would also be more sympathetic to religion, they would be more skeptical about social
welfare programs, they would have more hawkish foreign policy. Conversely, if someone was
committed to worrying about global warming, they'd also be concerned with economic inequality,
they'd favor early education programs. So, why is it? And Tom argued that it really
boils down to two different visions of human nature -- whether you have an inherently tragic
vision - namely that we are all saddled with certain flaws and shortcomings because of
our innate endowment, we're subject to self-serving biases and short-sightedness and selfishness
and therefore any social arrangement has to take the flaws of human nature into account,
as opposed to a utopian vision in which humans are pretty much blank slates where the right
parenting, the right social programs, the right media programming can shape people into
whatever form is socially desirable, and he argued in that book that all of these particular
opinions can fall out of these two fundamentally different visions of human nature.
Sally Satel: It's a great book. So, you've had, in addition to the debates we just mentioned,
you participated in a charged discussion with Larry Summers, the president of Harvard, and
this had to do with -- where Larry Summers even suggested there may be innate differences
in gender and mathematical ability. M y question is,
these are taboo -- we could call them taboo subjects, third rail kinds of issues -- what
kind of advice do you have for folks who are in the field or are interested in these but
are also a little bit nervous about the implications for their career?
Steven Pinker: Yeah. It is a charged subject because many topics in psychology touch on
various taboos simply because human behavior is what everyone's interested in. There aren't
all that many raging debates over fungi but -- so, if you're a mycologist, you have
a blessed life compared to being a psychologist. I would say, first of all, choose your controversies
carefully. Don't just be outrageous on everything at once. Pick a topic in which there are a
lot of data, and so the debate can be as scientific as possible. Don't take outrageous opinions
that aren't well supported by the data. Frame them in a way that is not deliberately inflammatory,
that acknowledges the potential dangers and shows how they don't necessarily lead to the
actual dangers. And maybe get tenure before you start talking about it.
Sally Satel: Yeah. I'm waiting for the T word there.
Steven Pinker: As flawed as tenure is, and it's not a system that anyone I think could
justify from scratch, I think it in today's environment does serve a purpose and there's
no question that if I didn't have tenure I would not have written on all the topics that
I have written about. Sally Satel: So, tenure's a good institution
from that standpoint alone. So, in The Better Angels of Our Nature, one of the sections
you have is on moral progress. And certainly we've made great strides. Slavery is clearly a thing of the past, women's rights are flourishing, animal cruelty
is abated, never enough but certainly much, much less of a problem than it was years and
years ago. So, my question is if you were to write to update to Better Angels in 100 years,
what do you think we'd look back on in 100 years and think, "Oh my gosh, we did those
things in 2015?" Steven Pinker: Yeah. I suspect that nuclear
weapons might be high on the list, that there's something particularly mad about nuclear weapons,
they're militarily useless other than deterring an all-out invasion and even then they're
in practice useless because of the great taboo against actually using them, so that's how
come Argentina could defy Britain over the Falklands knowing that Britain was not actually
going to use their nukes to render Buenos Aires a radioactive crater over the Falklands,
and so they did exactly what nuclear deterrent theorists said they shouldn't do, a non-nuclear
power threatening a nuclear one. Since they are almost by definition unthinkably
massive war crimes -- that is millions of noncombatants die, which is what should not happen in a
war -- their very existence is monstrous. I don't think that they deserve responsibility
for preventing war after 1945, superpower war. There is a coherent, non-utopian, non-romantic
movement that plots out a blueprint on how they might be eliminated. President Obama
actually signed onto it early in his presidency, which is one of the reasons he won the Nobel
Prize. It was derailed by a number of things, headaches like Putin and the Middle East and
it got sort of taken off the world's agenda. But in 100 years, it's quite possible that nuclear
weapons would be dismantled and our great grandchildren will be shaking their heads
as to how we ever lived with them. Other things - certainly many factory
farming practices would be very hard to defend. The incarceration of people for non-violent
crimes like drug possession, we're already starting to see a tipping point. Then of course
in much of the world there are practices such as the toleration of violence against women
or restrictions towards women, throwing people in jail for free speech where the advanced
Western democracies are already enjoying progress and there's still a lot of room for the rest
of the world to catch up. Sally Satel: Right. I hope you're right. We'll
meet back here in 100 years. I'm quoting you here, Steven. You said that
quote, "Psychology sits at the center of intellectual life. In one direction, it looks to the biological
sciences, to neuroscience, to genetics, to evolution. But on the other, it looks to the
social sciences and the humanities." So, do you think that psychology programs
are doing a good job of integrating those fields? That's part one of my question. And
then, do you think -- well, this is related -- if they're doing it enough, are they able
to do it in a broad-minded manner? And I say that with respect to the work of Jonathan
Haidt and Phil Tetlock who've documented a notable liberal slant in the membership of
the profession. Steven Pinker: Yeah. I don't think psychology
is doing it enough. I think psychology is too important a topic to be left to psychologists,
that in most areas of psychology there are huge amounts of insight particularly when
it comes to explanations, theories, ideas that have to come from other disciplines.
I think you can't study the psychology of language without knowing linguistic theory.
I think you can't understand visual perception without knowing something about computer vision.
You can't do social psychology without knowing game theory and evolutionary theory. So, I
think a psychology curriculum should not just recount the history of "p is less than 0.05"
experiments but has to invoke deeper theories often from other fields.
And I do think that the strong political monoculture of much of psychology is an impediment to
scientific progress -- namely there are certain hypothesis that are simply not on the table
because they're unthinkable. And this is not to prejudge whether any of those hypotheses
are true or false. But unless you entertain them, how do you know whether they're true
or false? Just to give you an example, an op-ed in The
Wall Street Journal just a couple of days ago, a column actually, on a finding relating
cortical thickness to poverty, that kids from poorer neighborhoods have thinner cerebral
cortexes, and it went on to argue this just shows the effects of plasticity, how a deprived
environment shrinks your gray matter, and maybe that's true. But the G word wasn't even
mentioned as a hypothesis -- namely the possibility that people vary because of their genome and
how thick their gray matter is. In fact, we know from twin studies that in fact there
is a heritable component to gray matter thickness. Whether that's the cause of the socio-economic
status differences, we can't know unless you look at both heritability and stimulation
and SES in a proper regression analysis. But if you take one potential factor and you don't
even test it, you're guaranteed to be ignorant about it. And I think that's just one of many
examples that John Haidt and Phil Tetlock and their collaborators I think correctly
point out in their Behavioral and Brain Sciences article that has retarded the progress of
our science. Sally Satel: Do you see any change over the
years or that's been pretty much static, the proportion of --
Steven Pinker: No. I think there is a change. I think it is improving. That -- just looking
at the introductory psychology textbooks, for example, they now tend to include a respectful
discussion of behavioral genetics when it comes to explaining intelligence and psychological
disorders, more so than the textbooks that I grew up with. Likewise, the role of evolution
in helping to understand altruism is now -- tends to be in the curriculum which was not true
20 or 30 years ago. So, I think there is progress. Sally Satel: That's encouraging. Well, about
teaching. You've won lots of teaching awards, I did not mention that in your introduction.
So, advice for teachers out there and graduate students who are about to become teachers?
Steven Pinker: Right. I'll be speaking about that later today, I'm giving the David Myers
Lecture in fact on teaching, although I'm going to concentrate in that lecture on writing,
because it's what my most recent book was about. But actually the psychology of writing
and the psychology of teaching overlap a lot and that what makes a good writer often makes
a good teacher. In particular I would single out two principles: one of them is concreteness
and vividness. When you become an expert in a subject, you tend to think about it more
and more abstractly and you forget all the concrete sensory details that the human mind really
needs to understand something. So, you talk about a stimulus instead of a bunny rabbit
or you talk about an emotional response instead of your heart rate goes up. A lot of opaque
writing comes from omitting perceptual detail in favor of abstraction and a lot of I think
ineffective teaching does the same thing, not because people are trying to sound highfalutin
and fancy and to bamboozle and impress but it's the natural psychological response to
becoming an expert, you tend to have bigger and bigger and more and more abstract chunks
and you forget that novices need to be reminded of physical events in order to understand
them. The other is being aware of a phenomenon that
has been rediscovered many times in psychology but my favorite name for it comes from an
economist, it's called the curse of knowledge. The difficulty that we have in imagining what
it's like not to know something that we do know. And in psychology it's also called mind
blindness, failure of theory of mind, hindsight bias, egocentrism, many different forms of
it. And when we teach, when we write, we are apt to project our own state of knowledge
outward and assume that background assumptions on why our questions are interesting, what
our jargon means are just common knowledge, that they're second nature, and we forget
that people who are as smart as we are but just haven't gone through the same history
of learning that we have need to start from the beginning and have concepts explained,
abstractions fleshed out, jargon terms defined. So, overcoming the curse of knowledge.
We also know from psychology, one of many areas in which psychological science makes
us more effective in all spheres of life, that the traditional advice of how to overcome
the curse of knowledge, namely empathize harder, put yourself in the other guy's shoes and
see the world from their point of view actually doesn't work very well because, for one thing,
the curse of knowledge prevents us from overcoming the curse of knowledge where you're not even
aware of what we take for granted almost by definition and just trying harder isn't enough.
Feedback signals are essential. Show your manuscript to other people in the case of
writing and you're often shocked to find out that what's obvious to you isn't obvious to
anyone else. And in the case of teaching, the kind of feedback that you get from constant
assessment. And any people in this room who are teachers know that when you get assignments
back, you're often stunned to find how shallow and incomplete the level of understanding
is, not because the students are lazy or stupid, but because you, the teacher, have failed
to spell out some of the foundations that you take for granted but that they have no
way of knowing. Sally Satel: I know. That's a horrible feeling
when the first time you realize the curse of knowledge is when you're giving your talk
and that's -- Steven Pinker: Yes.
Sally Satel: So, do you write for academic journals anymore or is that a thing of the
past? Steven Pinker: Oh, yes. Yes. I still go through
the agonies of revise and resubmit and reviewer number three and all of that. Yeah.
Sally Satel: Well, just briefly, because I know these things get extremely complicated,
what was the last academic paper you released? Steven Pinker: A major one was a paper in
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology published by the association whose name may
not be mentioned here, on common knowledge and coordination, I'm very excited about this.
It's the phenomenon of the difference between everyone knowing something and everyone knowing
that everyone else knows it, that is I know that you know that I know that you know that
I know that you know ad infinitum, which received some technical analysis in economics and game
theory and logic and linguistics but very little in psychology. But I think it's a profound
topic for psychology. I think we have a sensitivity to the difference
between mere shared knowledge and common knowledge. We see it in idioms like "the elephant in
the room" and "the emperor's new clothes" and metaphors like, "it's out there, you can't
take it back." I think we navigate our social relationships via common knowledge,
"I'm your friend because I know that you know that I know that you know," or I'm your superior
or subordinate or business partner or sexual partner or romantic partner because of this
common knowledge. A lot of phenomena of social life such as innuendo, taboo, euphemism, double
speak come from our attempt to convey information while preventing it from becoming common knowledge,
the difference between blurting out something and hinting at it by innuendo even when it's
transparent, the difference between "would you like to come up and see my etchings" and
"would you like to come up and have sex," even when no adult can fail to understand
the meaning of etchings. Why does that make such a psychological difference? Because with
the etchings, there is some deniability about whether the other person knows that you know
whereas when you blurt something out, it's a common knowledge generator.
And I think there's a vast number of social phenomenon, most of which deal with the problem
of coordination, that is cases in which the optimal behavior for you depends on what the
other person does and there are multiple possibilities, each of which could benefit you, but as long
as they're the same. And there's been so much of a focus in the evolution of social behavior
on altruism, cases in which I confer a benefit to you at a cost to myself, that we've lost
sight of the other logical possibility for social behavior -- namely, coordination or mutualism
-- I do something that benefits you and it benefits me at the same time: if we both drive
on the right, if we both use the compatible file formats in exchanging documents, if we
both agree either to be good friends or business associates but not mix them.
And common knowledge I think is what allows coordination for mutual benefit to happen.
And there are a huge array of social phenomena that are governed by our sensitivity to "I
know that he knows that I know that he knows" and in this paper we have some pilot experiments
just to show that people are highly sensitive to common knowledge when making risky decisions
on how to coordinate their behavior with other people.
Sally Satel: What's the title? Steven Pinker: Coordination and Common Knowledge.
Sally Satel: Oh, okay. I thought it was some cute title. Sometimes when --
Steven Pinker: Yeah, I know, like “The Elephant in The Room” or “Don't Go There” or
something else. Sally Satel: Yeah, “Don't Go There,” I
like that. Steven Pinker: Yeah.
Sally Satel: Back to students for a second, there was a book that came out last year called
Excellent Sheep by a man whose name I can't pronounce -- William Deresiewicz?
Steven Pinker: Deresiewicz. Sally Satel: Deresiewicz. Okay. And basically
he talked about students at elite schools and how conformists they were and how they're
not being encouraged to indulge in creativity or analysis. But you wrote an article, I think
it was in The New Republic, with a different view, and it seemed that you were kind of
unique in your defense of the student body. Can you say a little bit more about that?
Steven Pinker: Yes. So, this was a kind of extended character assassination of Ivy League
students, which in my experience was totally unwarranted. I think they're not, as he put
it twice "entitled, out-of-touch little shits," and I quote. They're very fine, generous,
respectful, serious people. But that wasn't really the crux of the article. The crux was
actually partly to expose actually a concern that both Deresiewicz and I share, which is
that the admissions criteria for elite universities are in many ways bizarre, that is you think,
well, when people say, "Oh, you're teaching at Harvard. There must be such brilliant,
cerebral students." The answer is no. A lot of them were chosen because they were
going to the lacrosse team and they played the bassoon and they edited the school newspaper
and their parents gave a lot of money to Harvard and they came from rural Wyoming, we need
more Wyoming students. And a very small percentage of them were chosen for intellectual merit
or interests, and once they get there they treat, in many of the Ivy Leagues they treat
-- and elite universities -- they kind of treat academics kind of the way you might
treat shuffleboard on a cruise ship, it's like one of a huge number of options and not
necessarily the most important one. Maybe And a lot of
my students say the most important experience they've had at Harvard is singing in the a
cappella group, and it's like, "Hey, well, what about us, professors," and of course,
there's all these things they worry about. And the priorities of the Ivy Leagues I think
are skewed, and I think that if both -- and of course, they can get away with it because
of I think a rather corrupt system where a lot of financial firms and tech companies
use graduation from a name brand university as a criteria for hiring.
I think that objective testing, both as an admissions criterion and as a hiring criterion
could get rid of a lot of unfairness in the system. And we tend to forget there's so much
bias against testing, that testing was originally a highly progressive indeed left liberal movement
because it would subvert class privilege and base advancement on raw talent and achievement,
and I think more of an emphasis on objective measures, not necessarily the tests we have
now, over subjective criteria, which again as psychologists we know that clinical subjective
personal decision-making is not as accurate as more actuarial statistical, data-driven
decisions. And that was really the bottom line of the article, to tie it back to psychology.
Sally Satel: So, we have a few more minutes. Let me ask you about photography. I know that's
one of your hobbies. Is there a coffee table book in your future or a more substantive
academic book about photography? Steven Pinker: At any one time, I have like
four or five ideas for books that I might or might not write at some time in the future,
and I do sometimes think of combining my rather than nerdy interest in photography with my
more scientific interest to write a book on the photographic mind, the psychology of photography
that would include visual perception, environmental aesthetics, some of the philosophical questions
of to what extent is a photograph an objective representation, all the more poignant in an
era of Photoshop editing. On the other hand, I'm sometimes deterred from doing that by
the thought that this is one area in which I can just kind of get into a flow without
having to think about critics and controversies. And if I suddenly merge that private zone
of just pure pleasure in the maelstrom of academic disputation, then I might kind of
destroy one of my main anxiety reduction techniques. So, I have second thoughts.
Sally Satel: Is it mostly nature photography?
Steven Pinker: No. Everything. People, urban photography, anything that's interesting to
look at. Sally Satel: And what's your current project?
Steven Pinker: The exploration of common knowledge is my main research activity, although I've
also been involved in studies of emotional expression, kind of a paper on what angry
faces are for with Ian Reed. I have a paper on critical periods in second-language acquisition
with Josh Hartshorne and Josh Tenenbaum. And I'm pondering a kind of a short manifesto
on science reason and enlightenment driven by data showing how much improvement there
has been in the human condition, not just in violence which I have written about, but
in pretty much every other sphere of human flourishing, that we're living longer, fewer
children are dying, fewer mothers are dying, more people are going to school, people are
richer -- positive quantifiable developments that many people in the world are unaware
of and that I think could be attributed to the growth of science reason and humanistic
values. Sally Satel: Can you give us one example that
you think -- you thought most people weren't aware that violence declined, I know that.
Steven Pinker: Yes, that's right. People are not aware that homicide, rape, child abuse,
war deaths, when plotted quantitatively as opposed to driven by the availability heuristic,
namely examples that you can remember, the graphs all go down. But what I didn't spell
out in The Better Angels of Our Nature and which is I think worth further explanation
is that it's not just violence but everything else that can go wrong in life that has decreased,
like disease, like extreme poverty, like illiteracy and ignorance, and that again as psychologists
we know that our impressions of the world are far too driven by anecdotes stoked by
the very nature of news. News is about stuff that happens, not about
stuff that doesn't happen, more things can go wrong than can go right, and so events-driven
information streams -- in other words, the news -- will distort our appreciation of the
state of the world, especially as we become better and better at reporting the news worldwide,
so we always think that the world is going to hell whereas -- and it's only when you
plot data as best you can on how many kids survive the first year of life, how many kids
go to school, that you realize that things are getting better. And if twice as many kids
in Africa go to school now as did in the past, there's never any Thursday in which that's
a headline. Likewise, if fewer mothers die in childbirth, if fewer people get malaria,
that is never a headline, it's never something you can click on unless you follow the trends
that I think the noble people who try to quantify the state of the world, and I think that deserves
much greater attention. Sally Satel: Thank you. And actually my last
question is advice for the group. Steven Pinker: I do think, just to repeat
a point I made earlier, that psychology is too important to be left to psychologists,
that it really is at the center of human concerns, Societies and political systems
are the products of human psychology, namely people negotiating agreements to co-exist
and cooperate and coordinate. The arts are products of human psychological faculties,
of music is related to auditory perception or painting to visual perception, poetry and
fiction to our capacity for language, and they're driven by our social psychology. And
in the other direction, you can't understand where our psychology came from unless you
appreciate both the biological sources: neuroscience, genetics, evolution and the laws governing
complex interacting systems: artificial intelligence, computation, game theory, information theory,
complexity theory. So, being interested in the human mind requires being interested in
many other things and collectively that's what's going to advance our understanding
of what makes us tic. Sally Satel: Okay. Well, thank you, Steven
Pinker, and thank you, everyone, for coming. Steven Pinker: Thank you.
