Psych Professor Steven Pinker Criticizes Cancel Culture in Academia, Promotes Ideological Openness at IOP Forum

Harvard Psychology professor Steven A. Pinker condemned the rise of cancel culture in higher education at an Institute of Politics forum on Wednesday, telling his audience that academics must avoid punitive reactions to peers who voice unorthodox beliefs.

Pinker — an outspoken critic of what he sees as a liberal monoculture at Harvard — argued that higher education has shifted toward a censorious climate of penalizing students and scholars who break norms, ultimately discouraging individuals from sharing unpopular opinions.

The prevalence of “canceling” people over ideological differences in academia is particularly ironic for a discipline whose goal is to “ascertain the truth,” according to Pinker, but he argued that it is also driven by universal psychological traits.

At Wednesday’s talk, Pinker said that healthy conversations must balance norms of respect with the freedom to disagree.

“Ideally, we try to bracket off what are the norms of debate such that there’s no holds barred in terms of the content of an idea,” he said.

“At the same time, as we try to retain our relationships with each other as social beings, mindful of each other’s feelings, so the ideas are fair game. People ought to be respected. It’s very hard to separate those,” he added.

Academics, he said, must frequently judge ideas for their intellectual rigor, but they should avoid creating an environment where their colleagues fear being ostracized, punished, or fired for their beliefs.

“It’s in the very nature of the enterprise that you just can’t do it if you’re constantly watching your back, that some idea might offend someone and cost you a job or lead to appropriate or social death,” he said.

He said that his decision to establish the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard in April 2023, a faculty group centered on promoting free speech and inquiry, was driven by “various incidents” of cancellation, censorship, and “shaming”.

CAFH — and later its parallel undergraduate group, Harvard Undergraduates for Academic Freedom — rose to prominence in the fall of 2023 as Harvard came under fire for its response to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, intense protests against the war in Gaza, and rising fears of antisemitism on campus. Leaders from the group met with top Harvard officials in December of that year as Claudine Gay’s short-lived presidency unraveled, and Pinker positioned himself as an authority on how Harvard could navigate out of crisis.

On Wednesday, Pinker pointed to his own scholarship on “common knowledge” — information that is accepted as widely known. He argued that common knowledge is core to upholding social norms, as people tend to share an understanding of acceptable public behavior. But he said that overpolicing norms fuels cancel culture and hinders intellectual debate.

“We tend to be attentive to people broaching the norm, particularly in a public forum, and if they do, there is a need to prop up the norm by making it common knowledge that you can’t get away with breaching that norm,” he said.

But Pinker said the phenomenon of common knowledge goes far beyond academia, shaping every aspect of “human coordination” — from currency and language to the power of governments.

“Common knowledge, in this technical sense, refers to the state in which I know something. You know it. I know that you know it. You know that I know it. I know that you know that I know that you know it, and so on ad infinitum,” Pinker said.

“When one of us sees something and another one sees it and each sees the other one seeing it, that generates all of these levels implicitly,” he said. “It’s inherently psychological.”