Aside from his mane of iron grey hair, Steven Pinker appeared every bit the clean-cut professor. Seated in his ninth-floor office, the 54-year-old Harvard psychology professor wore a three-button grey suit when I sat down with him for an interview last week. It was only halfway through our talk, when he crossed his left leg over his right, that I looked down and noticed his snakeskin cowboy boots. It seemed fitting that Pinker's sartorial sense echoed his intellectual manner-traditionally rigorous, but with a sense of mischief.
One of the world's leading cognitive psychologists, Pinker has made quite a name for himself since graduating from McGill University more than three decades ago. He has taught at Harvard, Stanford, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, published several bestselling books on the mind, is a frequent contributor to publications such as The New York Times, and, perhaps most impressively, has been grilled twice by Stephen Colbert on his faux-news program, The Colbert Report. It's somewhat comforting to know, then, that this intellectual rock star's formative years were spent in discussion with friends over "bad sandwiches" in the Stewart Biology Building.
Growing up an Anglo-Montrealer
Like a number of McGill students, Pinker grew up in Montreal's Anglophone Jewish community.
"I grew up in the suburbs in Montreal West, although in the portion that was adjacent to Côte Saint-Luc," he said. "So I had one foot in the Anglophone WASP community that was represented in Montreal West, and another foot in the Jewish community which dominated Côte Saint-Luc."
Pinker was part of the last generation of unilingual Anglo-Montrealers born before the Quiet Revolution. Though he was just five years old when Jean Lesage was elected Quebec's premier in 1960, Pinker was shaped by the cultural upheaval in Montreal during the late 60s.
"When I grew up, there was an awful lot of racism against Francophone Quebecois," he said. "My friends and the community would tell insulting jokes about Quebecois, kind of like the Polish jokes and black jokes that were being told elsewhere. There was an enormous amount of condescension and prejudice."
The turmoil of the Quiet Revolution resulted in the exodus of much of Pinker's generation of Anglophones from Montreal-indeed, Pinker's high school reunion was held in Toronto.
Pinker was a bit of a radical in his teenage years, and for a time considered himself an anarchist. At the time, a close friend of Pinker's convinced him that people in a natural state would spontaneously co-operate for the greater good. The police, his friend said, caused more violence than they prevented. Pinker's romantic ideal of anarchism was then put to the test during the 1969 Montreal police strike, which he later described in his book The Blank Slate.
"All hell broke loose," Pinker said. "There were riots, looting, vandalism, and even one homicide, all in the space of several hours. And so my parents won that argument, and ever since then I've not been an anarchist. I appreciate the role of democratic government, and a monopoly on violence in the hands of a democratic authority."
A hippie education at Dawson College
Pinker went on to attend Dawson College after high school in 1971, just two years after the institution of the CEGEP system in Quebec.
"There was a lot of 60s hippie stuff," recalled Pinker. "There were courses that resembled nothing in a traditional academic curriculum, in which faculty would just draw far-flung connections: this idea from existentialism reminded them of that idea from Marxism, which then brought in Freud, which was related to the postmodernists. And professors would bring together this mélange of ideas, which I quickly began to find unsatisfying because the connections were so tenuous and undisciplined."
Partly because of Dawson's radical teaching style, Pinker began to gravitate towards the college's psychology department. He said that the debates raging in the 1970s over what type of government and society Canada should have-debates Pinker believes were rooted in questions of human nature-also affected the decision.
"These debates were in the air, and I took a number of courses at Dawson that approached human nature from different vantage points: sociology, anthropology, psychology, philosophy, English literature," he said. "Psychology seemed to me to have the best combination of eternal, cosmic questions about human nature with rigorous testability and precision."
Seminars and coffee shop discussions at McGill
After graduating from Dawson, and already on track towards a career in psychology, Pinker continued on to McGill.
"It was kind of a default choice, to be honest," he said with a laugh. "I got a great education there, but honestly I did not go through the [extensive selection] process that many Americans go through."
Professor Al Bregman, a psychologist of auditory perception who remains an emeritus professor today, was Pinker's greatest intellectual influence at McGill. Pinker fondly described both working in Bregman's lab and taking an advanced seminar in cognition with the professor, in which Bregman fascinated Pinker with his deep analysis of ideas.
"He looked at ideas from Piaget, from Chomsky, from artificial intelligence, from the empiricist and rationalist philosophers, and he would dig out the abstract commonalities, connect the historical influences, probe strengths and weaknesses in a way that I found quite exhilarating," Pinker said.
When asked, Pinker admitted to being a pretty serious student, never even indulging in a beer during his time at McGill, despite frequently hanging out in Gert's.
"I think I had my first beer in graduate school," he said. "I know, it sounds kind of pathetic. I mean, I wasn't a recluse. I had a very intense social life-dancing and eating out-but there was not a lot of alcohol."
Pinker extended his belief that our peers affect our development more than our parents to his experiences at McGill, where he said his friends perhaps influenced him the most.
"I was part of a group of intellectually intense fellow students, where we would continue to argue issues from courses, or that any of us had read about, over coffee in all those wonderful Hungarian coffeehouses that no longer exist in downtown Montreal," he said. "And we would challenge each other and egg each other on."
Pinker said he and his coffeehouse friends, with whom he also shared the Stewart Biology Building's bad sandwiches, playfully referred to themselves as the "Gang of Four." Besides Pinker, the group included Brian Leber, now a professor of biochemistry at McMaster University in Hamilton; Vincenzo Dinicola, now a Montreal psychiatrist; and Fabio Idrobo, a psychology professor who teaches at Boston University, just a few miles from Pinker's office at Harvard.
"We would be constantly talking psychology, philosophy, biology," said Pinker. "In that regard, it kind of reminds me of the atmosphere at the City College in New York in the 30s and 40s, which [was] the crucible for the New York intellectuals. … I feel like my intellectual influence came from the grungy cafeterias and Hungarian coffee shops of downtown Montreal during those years."
A series of bestsellers
Pinker graduated from McGill in 1976 and went on to Harvard, where he completed a PhD in experimental psychology in 1979. Aside from its world-class reputation, Pinker said he was drawn to Harvard by a kind of romantic fascination with the school. It was at Harvard that the "cognitive revolution" in psychology had taken place in the 50s and 60s, a movement that had inspired Pinker to pursue a career in understanding the mind.
After bouncing between universities for a period, Pinker settled at MIT, where he focussed on understanding the psychology of language. After writing two dense academic volumes during the 1980s, Pinker published The Language Instinct in 1994, his first work for a wider audience.
"I had read popular science in other fields and was excited by it, such as Stephen Jay Gould's writing in evolutionary biology, Freeman Dyson on physics, Lewis Thomas in medicine and biology," he said. "And I thought that no one had done that for language and cognition."
The Language Instinct accomplished exactly what Pinker had hoped, garnering glowing reviews and impressive sales. A string of successful works intended for a popular audience followed, each an interdisciplinary feast combining Pinker's interest in psychology, neuroscience, and linguistics.
Pinker's most recent book, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature, ties together many of his ideas on language and the mind. In the book, published in 2007, Pinker argues that humans follow certain semantic rules-logical, not arbitrary, rules-without realizing that they are doing so. These hidden rules, manifested in subtle parts of speech like irregular verbs, help to explain how children manage to understand the complexities of English grammar without endless trial and error.
The Stuff of Thought is strikingly interdisciplinary, rooted as much in linguistics as it is in cognitive psychology. When asked if this may be the result of those coffeehouse discussions at McGill, Pinker said he'd like to think so. Academic divisions are somewhat artificial anyway, he argued.
"An academic discipline is a sociological, historical, cultural institution that grew up because of various accidents of history the same way that the QWERTY keyboard on the typewriter became standardized," Pinker said. "It doesn't necessarily correspond to the optimal way of dividing up the scholarly labour in understanding some phenomenon."
An ambitious future
Pinker's current project may be his most ambitious yet. His new book asks why human society has become less violent over time, and looks for answers in the mind.
"The question for a psychologist is, given that presumably human nature has not changed over the centuries, how is it we've been able to become less violent?" Pinker asked. "And by that I mean that homicide rates have gone down over the last 600 or 700 years in any area in the world in which they can be measured over that many centuries, that warfare has plummeted since the end of the Second World War, and that annual deaths in warfare are maybe at an all-time low."
Pinker suggested that a number of factors may be contributing to this decline, rooting his arguments in the political philosophy of his hero Thomas Hobbes, the 17th century Englishman who theorized that only a "leviathan," or powerful government, could maintain peace and order.
"I think that as we've become more cosmopolitan and literate and educated, our sense of empathy has expanded, and so we're less apt to demonize people who are not like us and to imagine the world from their point of view," he said.
Attempting to explain as broad and complex a series of events as the global reduction in violence over several centuries is certainly ambitious, but it's simply the next step for Pinker. And if his previous works are any guide, the book will be relentlessly interdisciplinary, thoroughly erudite, and mixed with the mischievous intellectual curiosity that has defined Pinker's work since his days at McGill.
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Terri Gates
posted 4/20/09 @ 5:43 PM EST
What an excellently written article! I never thought cognitive psychology could be so interesting. Kudos to the author for creating a fascinating and eminently readable profile of Professor Pinker. (Continued…)
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