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Steven Pinker
By Caleb NeelonPhoto By Peter Tannenbaum
Face it: if you’re reading this magazine, being cool is a dominant facet of your life. Experimental psychologist, linguist, and author Steven Pinker understands. “When I was in my teens in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s I wanted to look cool, so I wore my hair long. Then I got upset, because in the ‘80s everyone cool started to wear their hair short – what were they thinking? That was what the uncool people that I was reacting against did. Now I’m uncool! That’s not fair!” Fortunately, success validates any hairstyle, even for those members of the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists (if you doubt its existence, just Google it).
Pinker was born in Montreal in 1954 and has lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for the past 30 years, bouncing between MIT and his current employer, Harvard. In academia, he is, in the words of fellow Harvard professorial great Howard Gardner, “as close to a rock star as you get.” His research interests include “how we think, how we feel, and how we interact with one another, and more specifically how we talk, how we understand, how we learn language in the first place, and what language says about the way the mind works.” As a linguist, Pinker’s work was fueled by the grammatical errors of children using words with irregular past tenses: why do kids say things like “bringed” or “holded” when nobody is teaching them to do so? As an experimental psychologist, Pinker works on a far broader scale: his current work-in-progress, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature, follows his sweeping and wonderfully readable The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, and explores the effects of our genes and environment on our politics, emotions, gender relations, and even aesthetic sensibilities – all of which govern cool.
“What’s the psychology of cool?” Pinker chortles. “Well, I think we all care a lot about status. People are very sensitive to what would make them stand out. You want to stand out enough so that people think you are more clever or more artistic or more socially connected than other people, but not so far out that people think you are crazy or out to lunch. Everyone wants to be admired and accepted,” he explains, “but it depends on which coolness ladder you’re on. In academia, there’s as much fashion as anywhere else. Sheer brainpower is important, and we know that intelligence is about half to three-quarters heritable. There’s also a funny hierarchy in academia that parallels the hierarchy of status everywhere else, namely that the way to show that you’ve got money to burn is to use it on useless doodads. Everyone needs a place to live, and many of us need a car, but if you can afford to spend money on useless things, it proves that you’re really well off. Nowadays, we’ve got massive SUVs that waste gas and mansions that take up way too much space. But in academia, the more useless the discipline is, the higher the status. In academia, the most useless disciplines, like theoretical physics or pure math, are the highest in the pecking order, where things that are really useful, like dentistry, are kind of lower.”
Your genes are largely to blame for your looks and smarts, but, as Pinker explains, there’s a large X factor at work, one that allows for mousy artists to be cool while handsome and brilliant dorks remain nerdy. To Pinker, the mystery is in things like “wearing Hush Puppies when no one else is wearing them, or the first genius who turned his baseball cap around backwards in the 1980s. No one really knows what goes into that.” He has some speculations, however: “It’s gotta be a certain amount of selfconfidence, because there’s a certain amount of risk that you’ll be ridiculed. So there has to be a certain amount of self-confidence, and that’s probably partly genetic. It’s gotta be a certain amount of creativity. You might be confident, but unless you have the brilliant idea of turning a baseball cap around backwards, or wearing a goatee when everyone else is clean-shaven, you won’t get anywhere.”