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Interview

Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, and a popular writer on linguistics and evolutionary psychology. Angela Tan interviews him about politics, language, death, and reasons to be optimistic.

Hello Professor Pinker. In your book, The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011), you discuss the decline of violence and how, despite appearances otherwise, our own era is by far the most peaceful in human existence. Are there unconscious biases we hold as a society that prevent our seeing a decline in violence?

It’s hard to make a generalization about a whole society. But you certainly can talk about the beliefs of an individual, and there are a number of cognitive biases that get in the way of our individually appreciating the ways in which violence has declined. In particular, there’s an interaction between a cognitive bias which Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman dubbed the availability bias, where we use images, narratives, and stereotypes from memory as a guide to estimating the probability and frequency of risk.

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