THE PSYCHOLOGY PROFESSOR WHO BELIEVES THERE’S NEVER BEEN A WORSE TIME TO SPEAK OUR MINDS
When Steven Pinker comes to London, he likes to read British newspapers. He does so “to get a big dose of gossip about the Royals”. This is not what you expect to hear from a distinguished Harvard professor of psychology, whose most recent tome is blurbed with praise from Bill Gates. But it’s a part of human nature: the shared drive to be in on secrets and jokes, to know what everyone else is saying about everyone else, all of the time, if only to feel safe in the knowledge that we know it.
In psychology, things that everyone knows that everyone knows are called “common knowledge”. Attempts to get it, spread it or withhold it underline financial bubbles and crashes and the turn of political revolutions, Pinker argues in When Everyone Knows that Everyone Knows, which is his ninth and most recent book for general audiences. But his interest in common knowledge comes from its role in how we speak to one another and our relationships. This is the science of “harmony, hypocrisy and outrage”, as the rest of its title goes.
The book has landed at a good time. There is no shortage of outrage in our lives. In fact, Pinker thinks that it has never been harder to say what we think, and that more of us than ever feel inhibited in expressing what we believe.
Social media trailblazer
We are speaking at the culmination of a very long career. Pinker is 71. He has bright blue eyes, and he talks in a sprightly sort of way, which makes it easy to see in him the keen young man who first joined Harvard as a graduate student almost 50 years ago.
Since then, Pinker has spent his life trying to understand how the mind works: he focusses on problems like “visual cognition, how we form images in the mind’s eye, and how we allocate attention”. He is known for his work on how children learn language, and this research formed his first book for general audiences, The Language Instinct. It became a bestseller.
Today Pinker has sold more than two million books, and he has twice been nominated for a Pulitzer. He was also one of the first public intellectuals to gain a social media following, and his admirers have ranged from Stephen Fry to Mark Zuckerberg. An article in Forbes, in 2015, called him the “rock star psychologist” (and he still has a brilliant mop of silver curls to match).
Now he is perhaps best known for his impassioned defence of free speech. He sits on the boards of a dozen free speech organisations, including the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, of which he is co-president, and he regularly writes about campus issues for titles like The New York Times.
But Pinker still thinks of himself as a psychologist first. “I would still describe myself as a cognitive scientist, which is what I was trained in,” Pinker says. He has always chased his fascination with “what makes people tick”.
Where does the urge to cancel come from?
Pinker has argued that our minds are products of evolution: they work as they do because their features helped our ancestors to survive and reproduce. “And since males and females face different evolutionary challenges, their minds may not be identical,” he explains (an implication which, he notes, has been supported by many findings in psychology, anthropology, and neuroscience).
When these sorts of theories were proposed in the 1970s, while Pinker was an undergraduate, and as second wave feminism pushed for equality between the sexes, they were highly unpopular. Scientists making such claims became the targets of “furious emotional responses, demonstrations at talks, attempts to shut them down”, he recalls.
This was long before the internet, and Pinker didn’t face that anger himself. But even then he wanted to know “why certain topics were considered not just factually incorrect… but why it went past mere criticism to character assassination, de-platforming, drowning out”.
This is what he now refers to as “the cancelling instinct” – and much like the “language instinct” he previously investigated, Pinker believes that the “cancelling instinct” is common to all of us.
To understand why, you have to look at how it finally came for Pinker, as it did in July 2020. Six-hundred academics signed an open letter to the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) to demand that the organisation revoke Pinker’s status as a fellow. The signatories pointed at six of Pinker’s social media posts, which were said to promote ideas that were inconsistent with anti-racist efforts “by misrepresenting facts”.
But the signatories couldn’t hold up a specific racist thing that Pinker had said or done. They were angry that he “cited studies contradicting woke dogma, such as that racism is in decline and that police shootings don’t target blacks”, he says. To the contrary, “I have documented and celebrated the civil rights revolution and the decline of racism in my books,” he insists. But still the letter made international headlines, and his name still raises hackles in some rooms.
So, Pinker was cancelled. Or was he? To his mind, no. “I still don’t want to play the victim, because nothing really happened to me,” he says. More than a dozen academics and journalists publicly defended him. “I was a tenured professor, they couldn’t get me fired.”
Yet he is clearly still pent up about the whole thing. “Of course it was annoying. It was hurtful.” Upsetting too was “just the sheer stupidity of the accusations, the low intellectual standards to which a generation of mainly graduate students and young linguists had sunk to”. Pinker notes that “there’s been more cancellation in the last five years than even the McCarthy era, which was atrocious”.
But, he says he “didn’t want to fight that battle in this book”.
“What I did do in this book was change hats into a psychologist and ask why is there an urge to cancel in the first place?” And to that end – why is it such a big part of life today?
The power of how we think about each other
In the simplest terms, the cancelling instinct is an attempt to “control the spread of common knowledge” Pinker believes. His own studies, quoted in his new book, suggest that the people leading cancellation mobs are trying to stop what they see as harmful ideas from becoming widely known and gaining adherents as a result.
Pinker thinks that the huge rise in online “cancellations” and offline sackings in academia in recent years has created a growing pressure to say the right things, or else be shamed – and it “doesn’t only affect people in universities or heavy social media users”. Pinker says: “People in all walks of life are feeling that they have to watch what they say.”
The professor’s research shows that people who control common knowledge have the power to shape social situations. Common knowledge underlies a phenomenon called the bystander effect, for example, where people are less likely to intervene to help a person in need when others are watching.
It makes sense to Pinker that young people are often at the front of social media mobs. “When you’re young, you haven’t accomplished much,” Pinker points out. “You don’t have to have accomplished much to say that so and so is a bigot, is a racist, is a bad person. So it is a way that you can elevate your own status on the cheap.”
We generate common knowledge when we smile, blush, laugh or cry, too, Pinker has found. His work demonstrates that embarrassment – and other “self-conscious emotions” like shame – arise in the presence of common knowledge.
Common knowledge even rules our sex lives, Pinker suggests. “Innuendos convey their own message,” he explains. Grown-ups all know what it means to “come up and see my etchings”, in old-fashioned parlance, but invitations like this leave room for plausible deniability. They bar the release of common knowledge and make it so that people can “resume their social relationship as platonic friends, as colleagues, whatever the relationship is” if an advance is turned down.
Dealing with criticism
What became obvious to Pinker in 2020, which he could never have appreciated through his scientific research alone, was just how badly criticism hurts – that it “arouses the impulse to punish or censor the critic, and this is a feature of human nature”.
Pinker himself feels the increasing pressure to act correctly, despite knowing how this social game works from the inside out. “There’s actually a jargon term for it within cognitive psychology, called cognitive impenetrability,” he explains. Knowing how the mind works in theory “doesn’t actually penetrate into the inner workings” and make psychologists like him any more hardy than the rest of us.
But the professor, who has been made famous for speaking his mind, is clearly more resilient to this insidious form of social pressure than most. So what would he recommend we do to toughen up in the face of censure?
“I try not to just court controversy, poke the bear, whack the beehive. You know, I don’t like controversy for its own sake,” Pinker says. “I choose my controversies carefully, where I feel I can defend a position that’s worth defending.” Which is another way to say that you should pick your battles carefully.
A bit of carefully deployed hypocrisy is no bad thing, he adds – we all need a bit of “what we call tact, social skill, savoir faire”. Marriages, for example, “depend on the fiction of utter devotion and monogamy”, even though “most people’s heads are at least occasionally turned”. Whatever the truth may be, “it’s not necessarily a wise idea to tell your partner who you fantasised about having sex with”.
People who never learn to take criticism on the chin “find it devastating, or worse, find it an outrage that has to be censored”, says Pinker. Taking it well is something to be practised. “Don’t think about it before you go to bed,” he advises. “Don’t do it over a meal. Find a time, like, say, first thing after breakfast, when you’re alert, you’ve got your faculties mobilised, but it isn’t going to put a cloud of gloom over your mental life.”
2025-11-12T18:55:47Z
