Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker is a Canadian-born cognitive psychologist and popular science author who is the Johnstone Family professor of psychology at Harvard University. He writes about how the mind works, with The Language Instinct (1994) arguing that language is an innate behavior shaped by natural selection, a view he returns to in How the Mind Works and The Blank Slate. His later books take wider views, including The Better Angels of Our Nature (2010) on the decline of violence and Enlightenment Now (2018) on reason and humanism.