Steven Pinker Celebrity professor brings his ‘mind’ to Harvard

Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology Steven Pinker, who returned to Harvard last fall after more than 20 years, sits in his spacious Williams James Hall office speaking about revolution.

But he is not your typical revolutionary.

On the one hand, you can tell he is a member of academia. Beyond one shoulder, a multi-colored model of the human brain sits on a windowsill; beyond the other and lofted above his desk lies three bookshelves containing his own written works, “including all the foreign translations and British editions, hardback and paperback,” he says.

But his relaxed demeanor and signature hair style—think Mick Jagger’s flowing mane plus curls—give him a pop, not professorial, appeal.

Like those of the greatest members of academia, Pinker’s revolution is a revolution of knowledge, yet like Jagger’s musical revolution, his is also one that reaches the masses. Pinker’s books question psychology’s conventional wisdom that environment rather than genes determines one’s character. Yet in defending “nature, not nurture,” Pinker’s language remains uncannily lucid and accessible to the “lay public” that does not call psychology its profession.

“Steve is a polymath whose breadth of knowledge and range of interests is really quite amazing,” says Professor of Psychology Richard J. McNally, adding that “the popularity of his recent books has heightened his visibility even among those relatively unfamiliar with psychology.”

Pinker brought his ideas and communication skills back to Harvard’s lecture halls this year—he earned a Ph.D. in psychology from Harvard in 1979 and taught here for one year in 1980-81—after honing those skills for the past two decades at MIT.

“I’d been at MIT for 21 years so it was a good time for a change,” says the Montreal, Canada native. “Also my interests have broadened since I’ve arrived at MIT” to the realms of evolutionary biology and physical anthropology—areas which, he says, he will be able to more effectively explore at Harvard.

In Pinker’s early career, he focused on language acquisition in children, but since then his research has led him to explore related fields of study, especially evolutionary psychology.

His 1997 book How the Mind Works explores how an innate set of emotions developed through evolution, not individual environment, forms character.

Pinker’s books have twice made him a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize—in 1998 for How the Mind Works and in 2003 for The Blank Slate.

THE HUMAN MIND

After a light teaching load this past fall semester, in which he only guest lectured in graduate courses, Pinker taught Science B-62, “The Human Mind” and a graduate companion course, Psychology 3500, “The Human Mind: Talking Points” this spring. With 270 students, the Core class ranked fifth-highest in enrollment among all spring semester courses.

Students praised Pinker’s lecturing style, indicating that his lucidity in writing transfers over to the classroom.

“He has an uncanny ability to take something barely comprehensible and explain it in a way that pretty much anyone can understand,” says Colin J. Barclay ’07, who was enrolled in the course.

“He’s probably the best lecturer I’ve had here so far. He just knows everything. He’s the man,” adds Helen V. Chou ’04, who also took the course.

But praise for “The Human Mind” was not universal.

Melissa Lo ’04 says that though the class covered a broad range of theories, “nothing [was] totally in depth.”

“Pinker is like a mechanical lecturer who knows the stuff that he’s talking about really well to the extent that it seems that it’s really rehearsed,” she says.

Students did complain about the course’s heavy workload—its four one-page papers, two 10-page papers, midterm and final made it one of the most work-intensive Core courses—but they said it was not enough to dissuade them from taking the course.

“It was a lot of work but I feel like it was worth it to be part of his class. In retrospect though I would’ve taken a lighter class load in another class to compensate for his class,” says Andrew P. Brecher ’07.

But “The Human Mind” Head Teaching Fellow Nedim T. Sahin notes that the course has a lighter workload—by one research paper—than the “Introduction to Psychology” course Pinker taught at MIT, on which “The Human Mind” is modeled.

THE PINKER MIND

Lindsley Professor of Psychology Stephen M. Kosslyn says that what sets Pinker apart from his peers is “a happy intersection of intelligence, clear-headedness, perspective and energy level.” “He knows how to make science fun,” Kosslyn says.

Psychology Department Chair and Kenan Professor of Psychology Daniel L. Schacter adds that Pinker has an uncanny ability to unite two divergent worlds.

“He combines the roles of scientist and scholar very nicely,” he says. “He combines on the one hand scientific strength so that he’s made important contribution to the scientific analysis of human language and he puts that together with the broadly scholarly perspective that you see in his book.”

But Pinker’s ability to bridge two other worlds—those of academia and the general public—may prove to be one of his greatest legacies.

His books are both basic texts in the field of psychology and number one bestsellers. Indeed, his course website, which contains links to several of his articles in scholarly journals and lists his fields of research—including “inflectionary morphology” and “neuroimaging of inflection”—also prominently displays on its cover page a cartoon caricature of Pinker, his signature hair dominating the rest of his features.

Pinker cites his colleagues and students as the best part of being at Harvard. When asked how long he plans to stay at Harvard, the tenured Pinker’s response was characteristically simple yet meaningful.

“Forever, I hope,” he said.

—Staff writer William C. Marra can be reached at wmarra@fas.harvard.edu.