The Better Angels of Our Nature

October 25, 2011
Steven Pinker

Violence has been in decline for millennia. We once lived in a world in which human sacrifice, sadistic torture, brutal slavery, political murder, and blood sports were commonplace. Using more than a hundred graphs and maps, Steven Pinker shows that the conventional wisdom that we are living in a violent era is an illusion. Drawing from psychology, history, brain science, war studies, game theory, complexity theory, and popular culture, Pinker explores where violence comes from, why it has been so common over the course of history, and how we’re slowly controlling it

Speaker Details

Steven Pinker is an experimental psychologist and one of the world’s foremost writers on language, mind, and human nature. Currently Harvard College Professor and Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, Pinker has also taught at Stanford and MIT. He has received six honorary doctorates and was once named one of Time magazine’s “100 Most Influential People in the World Today.”