Quote

I think the reason that swearing is both so offensive and so attractive is that it is a way to push people's emotional buttons, and especially their negative emotional buttons. Because words soak up emotional connotations and are processed involuntarily by the listener, you can't will yourself not to treat the word in terms of what it means.

Steven Pinker

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Steven Pinker
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: September 18
Anthropologist
Linguist
Non-Fiction Writer
Philosopher
Psychologist
University Teacher
Montreal
Quebec
Steven Arthur Pinker
Way
Especially
Buttons
Involuntarily
Think
Emotional
Offensive
Connotations
Thinking
Term
Push
Soak
People
Word
Attractive
Processed
Words
Treat
Connotation
Means
Treats
Swearing
Reason
Negative
Listener
Mean
Terms
Listeners

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I think a lot of moral debates are not over what is the basis of justice, but who gets a ticket to play in the game.
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One of the perks of being a psychologist is access to tools that allow you to carry out the injunction to know thyself.
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I like ice hockey. No one is ever going to ask me to write about that as a metaphor for life.
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The European wars of religion were more deadly than the First World War, proportionally speaking, and in the range of the Second World War in Europe. The Inquisition, the persecution of heretics and infidels and witches, they racked up pretty high death tolls.
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Evolution is an indispensable component of any satisfying explanation of our psychology.
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A successful learner, . . . must be constrained to draw some conclusions from the input and not others.
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In the 1970s, many intellectuals had become political radicals. Marxism was correct, liberalism was for wimps, and Marx had pronounced that 'the ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.'
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Cognitive psychology tells us that the unaided human mind is vulnerable to many fallacies and illusions because of its reliance on its memory for vivid anecdotes rather than systematic statistics.
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Knowledge is a continuous fabric, in which ideas are connected to other ideas. Reason-free zones, in which people can assert arbitrary beliefs safe from ordinary standards of evaluation, can only corrupt this fabric, just as a contradiction can corrupt a system of logic, allowing falsehoods to proliferate through it.
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Most wars are not fought over shortages of resources such as food and water, but rather over conquest, revenge, and ideology.
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You could think of an ecosystem as a bunch of antagonistic arms races, almost: Everything that an animal depends upon for food is the body part of some other animal or plant who would just as soon keep that body part for itself.
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Evolutionary psychology is one of four sciences that are bringing human nature back into the picture.
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As individual people, embedded in our daily lives, of course we're interested in what makes one person different from another. We've got to hire one person and not another, marry one person and not another.
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Evolutionarily speaking, there is seldom any mystery in why we seek the goals we seek — why, for example, people would rather make love with an attractive partner than get a slap on the belly with a wet fish.
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Many artists and scholars have pointed out that ultimately art depends on human nature.
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We're living in primate heaven. We're warm, dry, we're not hungry, we don't have fleas and ticks and infections. So why are we so miserable?
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Climate change could produce a lot of misery and waste without necessarily leading to large-scale armed conflict, which depends more on ideology and bad governance than on resource scarcity.
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Language mavens commonly confuse their own peeves with a worsening of the language.
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If we are not to abandon values such as peace and equality, or our commitments to science and truth, then we must pry these values away from claims about our psychological makeup that are vulnerable to being proven false.
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The reason I'm not a neurobiologist but a cognitive psychologist is that I think looking at brain tissue is often the wrong level of analysis. You have to look at a higher level of organization.
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