Steven Arthur Pinker is a Canadian-American cognitive psychologist, psycholinguist, popular science author, and public intellectual. He strongly advocates for evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind and is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. His expertise lies in visual cognition and developmental linguistics, with research topics encompassing mental imagery, shape recognition, visual attention, language regularity and irregularity, the neural basis of words and grammar, and childhood language development. Additionally, Pinker's work delves into the psychology of cooperation and communication, focusing on emotional expression, euphemism, innuendo, and the dynamics of common knowledge.

Pinker's contributions to the field of language acquisition are significant, with two technical books presenting a general theory. His collaboration with Alan Prince in 1989 provided a critical perspective on the connectionist model of children's verb learning, introducing the concept of default rules and the individual learning of irregular forms.

As an author, Pinker has penned nine books for general audiences. The Language Instinct (1994), How the Mind Works (1997), Words and Rules (2000), The Blank Slate (2002), and The Stuff of Thought (2007) explore various aspects of psycholinguistics and cognitive science, offering insights into his research. The Sense of Style (2014) serves as a language-oriented guide. The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011) suggests a general decline in violence over time, attributing it to the humanitarian revolution of the Enlightenment. Enlightenment Now (2018) and Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters (2021) further discuss the role of reason in human progress.

His accolades include being named among Time's "The 100 Most Influential People in the World Today" and Foreign Policy's "Top 100 Global Thinkers". Pinker has received awards from prestigious institutions such as the American Psychological Association and the National Academy of Sciences. As a recognized thought leader, he's contributed to numerous journals and served on the advisory boards of several institutions, including a tenure as the chair of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary.