Person:

Pinker, Steven

We constructed a corpus of digitized texts containing about 4% of all books ever printed. Analysis of this corpus enables us to investigate cultural trends quantitatively. We survey the vast terrain of ‘culturomics,’ focusing on linguistic and cultural phenomena that were reflected in the English language between 1800 and 2000. We show how this approach can provide insights about fields as diverse as lexicography, the evolution of grammar, collective memory, the adoption of technology, the pursuit of fame, censorship, and historical epidemiology. Culturomics extends the boundaries of rigorous quantitative inquiry to a wide array of new phenomena spanning the social sciences and the humanities.

Whether a word has an irregular inflection does not depend on its sound alone: compare lie-lay (recline) and lie-lied (prevaricate). Theories of morphology, particularly connectionist and symbolic models, disagree on which nonphonological factors are responsible. We test four possibilities: (1) lexical effects, in which two lemmas differ in whether they specify an irregular form; (2) semantic effects, in which the semantic features of a word become associated with regular or irregular forms; (3) morphological structure effects, in which a word with a headless structure (e.g., a verb derived from a noun) blocks access to a stored irregular form; and (4) compositionality effects, in which the stored combination of an irregular word's meaning (e.g., the verb's inherent aspect) with the meaning of the inflection (e.g., pastness) doesn't readily transfer to new senses with different combinations of such meanings. In four experiments, speakers were presented with existing and novel verbs and asked to rate their past-tense forms, semantic similarities, grammatical structure, and aspectual similarities. We found: (1) an interaction between semantic and phonological similarity, coinciding with reported strategies of analogising to known verbs and implicating lexical effects; (2) weak and inconsistent effects of semantic similarity; (3) robust effects of morphological structure; and (4) robust effects of aspectual compositionality. Results are consistent with theories of language that invoke lexical entries and morphological structure, and which differentiate the mode of storage of regular and irregular verbs. They also suggest how psycholinguistic processes have shaped vocabulary structure over history.

Self-deception is a powerful but overapplied theory. It is adaptive only when a deception-detecting audience is in the loop, not when an inaccurate representation is invoked as an internal motivator. First, an inaccurate representation cannot be equated with self-deception, which entails two representations, one inaccurate and the other accurate. Second, any motivational advantages are best achieved with an adjustment to the decision rule on when to act, not with a systematic error in an internal representation.

We are getting smarter, and as a result the world is becoming a more peaceful place, says Steven Pinker.

OBJECTIVES: We explain why traits of interest to behavioral scientists may have a genetic architecture featuring hundreds or thousands of loci with tiny individual effects rather than a few with large effects and why such an architecture makes it difficult to find robust associations between traits and genes. METHODS: We conducted a genome-wide association study at 2 sites, Harvard University and Union College, measuring more than 100 physical and behavioral traits with a sample size typical of candidate gene studies. We evaluated predictions that alleles with large effect sizes would be rare and most traits of interest to social science are likely characterized by a lack of strong directional selection. We also carried out a theoretical analysis of the genetic architecture of traits based on R.A. Fisher's geometric model of natural selection and empirical analyses of the effects of selection bias and phenotype measurement stability on the results of genetic association studies. RESULTS: Although we replicated several known genetic associations with physical traits, we found only 2 associations with behavioral traits that met the nominal genome-wide significance threshold, indicating that physical and behavioral traits are mainly affected by numerous genes with small effects. CONCLUSIONS: The challenge for social science genomics is the likelihood that genes are connected to behavioral variation by lengthy, nonlinear, interactive causal chains, and unraveling these chains requires allying with personal genomics to take advantage of the potential for large sample sizes as well as continuing with traditional epidemiological studies.

English speakers disfavor compounds containing regular plurals compared to irregular ones. Haskell, MacDonald and Seidenberg (2003) attribute this phenomenon to the rarity of compounds containing words with the phonological properties of regular plurals. Five experiments test this proposal. Experiment 1 demonstrated that novel regular plurals (e.g., loonks-eater) are disliked in compounds compared to irregular plurals with illicit (hence less frequent) phonological patterns (e.g., leevk-eater, plural of loovk). Experiments 2–3 found that people show no dispreference for compounds containing nouns that merely sound like regular plurals (e.g., hose-installer vs. pipe-installer). Experiments 4–5 showed a robust effect of morphological regularity when phonological familiarity was controlled: Compounds containing regular plural nonwords (e.g., gleeks- hunter, plural of gleek) were disfavored relative to irregular, phonologically-identical, plurals (e.g., breex-container, plural of broox). The dispreference for regular plurals inside compounds thus hinges on the morphological distinction between irregular and regular forms and it is irreducible to phonological familiarity.