Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker

Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology, Harvard University

February 5, 2014 — 4:10 PM
International House, Chevron Auditorium — 2299 Piedmont Avenue, UC Berkeley Campus

Add to Google Calendar 02/05/2014 4:10 PM 02/05/2014 6:00 PM America/Los_Angeles The Elephant in the Room: The Psychology of Innuendo & Euphemism

About the Lecture Why don’t people just say what they mean? In his second lecture, Steven Pinker explains the paradoxical appeal of euphemism, innuendo, politeness, and other forms of shilly-shallying. About Steven Pinker Steven Pinker is an experimental psychologist and … Continued

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About the Lecture

Why don’t people just say what they mean? In his second lecture, Steven Pinker explains the paradoxical appeal of euphemism, innuendo, politeness, and other forms of shilly-shallying.

About Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker is an experimental psychologist and one of the world’s foremost writers on language, mind, and human nature. He is well known for his contributions to the fields of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind. Pinker’s has conducted extensive experimental and theoretical research on the acquisition, processing, history, and neural bases of language. Pinker has also conducted research in the filed of visual cognition, investigating phenomena such as the mind’s ability to imagine shapes and recognize faces. His most recent research investigates the phenomenon of common knowledge and how it can explain cooperation, nonverbal communication, and the rationales, innuendo, euphemism, and other forms of indirect speech. Pinker’s 2011 book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, advances the bold thesis that violence as a whole has declined over the course of world history. Drawing from a wide range of empirical data, Pinker argues that a combination of historical forces has shifted the psychological balance between motives for violence, particularly exploitation, revenge, dominance, and sadism, and motives for avoiding violence, particularly empathy, self-control, moral norms, and reason.


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