An Interview with Steven Pinker: Unraveling the Greatest Mysteries of the Mind

Within this field, what is still remaining to be explored, and how can we go about doing so?

Well there’s lots that we don’t understand and we always wanna learn more about why moral systems across the world differ and what they have in common. Why is it in some cultures considered okay to murder your sister if she’s had sex with a man other than the one that your father has chosen as her husband, but in other cultures that’s considered abhorrent? Conversely, why is it okay to bear flesh in our culture that would be considered highly immoral in some Middle Eastern cultures? And that’s just the tip of an iceberg of moral differences. What are some of the moral differences that animate people on the political left versus the political right? How do we understand the relationship between our moral sense and what feels icky to us? and What are  our best arguments as to what really is right and wrong?

We know that they can differ because sometimes in places there were perfectly natural institutions like slavery at the time, which we now realize to be monstrous. Conversely, there were acts that were considered to be immoral, like homosexual relations between consenting adults that now we consider to be no one else’s business. So why do our moral intuitions often lead us astray, and might they be leading us astray? Now, when people have resistance to perhaps things like choosing the traits of your offspring or a marketplace for donated organs. We often have a repugnance, are those products of mental quirks that we will overcome the same way we overcame our resistance to homosexuality? Or are they cases where they really are immoral, and our moral sense is tipping us off as to something that’s really out there.

Also, what leads to moral change? and why does it take longer in some cultures than others? Most people today have for many years thought that wars of conquest are not glorious and heroic, but rather stupid and cruel and abominable. But clearly Vladimir Putin does not agree with that. Why is it that at the given time you could have such clashing moral intuitions, and how does the world eventually come along with a particular view and become univocal in opposing it, slavery being an example, it used to be that some countries had abolished slavery, others thought it was fine. Now slavery doesn’t exist anywhere. Could that happen to institutions such as war and what’s taking it so long and how can we hasten it along?

What inspired you to begin writing books on psychology?

I thought that there was fascinating material that we had no right to keep hidden in journals and academic conferences and that we ought to share with the world. In the same way in which I enjoyed reading about evolutionary biology or paleontology or cosmology or medicine from popular writers, I thought that people should have access to some of the exciting ideas coming out of cognitive science. And there had not been professional scientists who had crossed over to try to explain these works to a broader public. And I confirmed that just from my conversations with people. People would say sometimes, sitting next to them on a plane or in a bar, what do you do for a living? Oh, I’m a cognitive psychologist I study language, or I study how people think, and they’d always say, “oh, that’s really interesting.” And so, I realized that there was a market I had in my own academic writing, and an editor at a university press that I’d worked with said, “for an academic, your writing doesn’t suck, but have you ever thought of trying for a broader audience?” And so that kind of lit a spark or planted a seed that grew into my book of the language instinct. I also got advice from another university press editor, Susan Milmow, who at the time was an editor at Cambridge University Press, and she gave me a bit of advice that I’ve remembered ever since. She said that a lot of academics, when they cross over to writing for a broader audience, they get it all wrong. They think that you’ve got to write in baby talk and bother ease. They think you’ve got to talk down to your audience or that you’re writing for people who aren’t very bright, that mindset never works. People don’t like to be talked down to, and there’s no need, because when you write a book for  a wider audience, you’re writing it for people who are intellectually curious and well-read and smart. They didn’t happen to go into the field that you went into, but it doesn’t mean that they’re not intellectually curious. It just means that they don’t know stuff that you know. And so she said, treat your reader with respect.

Treat them as a peer. Just take the attitude that they’re like a college roommate who just majored in something else and don’t know what you have learned all these years. That was great advice. I repeated it in my own book and realized  that the starting point is to treat your reader as a conversational partner, as an equal, someone who has not seen something that you have seen. You’re trying to orient them so that they can see it with their own eyes.