Why Steven Pinker is Wrong About Violence

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New research contradicts even more of Steven Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature.

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ABOUT: Rebecca Watson is the founder of the Skepchick Network, a collection of sites focused on science and critical thinking. She has written for outlets such as Slate, Popular Science, and the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. She's also the host of Quizotron, a rowdy, live quiz show that pits scientists against comedians. Asteroid 153289 Rebeccawatson is named after her (her real name being 153289).

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[marihawley]

Did his study at all account for war injuries that would have resulted in death but for the advancements in down range medical intervention and advanced treatment. As a (former, retired not divorced) military spouse people would try to make us feel better because the death toll wasn't as high, but the number of amputees or people with closed TBIs was very high. My friend's husband made it home but died month later, bleeding to death during a stroke that was caused by an IED explosion, his helmet weakened an artery and it ruptured. Death are down because we stitch them up better.

[LisaBeergutHolst]

Calling hunter-gatherer societies "non-democratic" is deeply ironic, considering that many have far more flexible leadership arrangements and greater gender equality than modern so-called "liberal democracies". Christopher Boehm argues in _Hierarchy in the Forest_ that resistance to being dominated by any one person is a hallmark of hunter-gatherer social structure. Hard to think of anything more democratic than that.

[AlexM-wqin]

Pinker's main argument in the book isn't that people are more altruistic. Quite the opposite. It's that even governments disinterested in the welfare of their citizens want to maintain stability (so that they may tax their populations) and so they eliminate tribal conflicts, violent crime, petty feuding etc. He also argues that international trade makes states mutually dependent on each other and internal commerce makes business more profitable than robbery. The argument that bigger societies are more peaceful ones is consistent with Pinker's work.

[MuchContractForYou]

Pinkers premise isn't just the theory of the long peace - it's that violence is going down and we don't exactly know why. The long peace was a potential part of that puzzle, albeit a very large portion of the book, but not the only part of it.

He also does cover famine during war (there is a section on deaths during the iraq war where he talks about this, if i'm not mistaken), and nuclear weapons as a deterrent.

If anything that study would help to supplement his overall thesis that violence is decreasing, not disprove it.

I'm also not sure it completely discounts the stabilizing effects of societal norms within a democracy, though I'd be the first to say that his defense of "western" values are a bit too dogwhistlish for me.


He also talks about domestic violence and the great strides feminism has had within our society in reducing both the occurrence and the lethality of such violence with things like the violence against women act, which for me was one of the more compelling arguments in the book. Another compelling argument is the idea of violence in communities being correlated with a rightful fear of police, and the racism that drives a kind of circle of violence between a police force and the population they're supposed to serve.


When I read the book in 2013, I looked for arguments against the long peace, and this is definitely a good one, great video overall.

[philippoulston]

It's as if Rebecca hasn't read the book at all.
Pinker has never said 'humanity is entering the long peace', in fact he has specifically declined making clear cut predictions about mankind's future. Instead he's pointed to that certain political and social structures many nations have adopted tend to mitigate against conflict.
The long peace is a term describing the relative peace since the second world war, a post facto statement, not a predictive one.

[marxist-gluteus-maximus]

This is kind of what I get out of the majority of Steven Pinker's work I've seen. Like, he's extremely intelligent and researches very well, but he makes some conclusions which just don't seem right. What I do notice about him is he has managed to achieve a very strong fanbase of people that like to confirm their opinion the status quo narrative is superior to anything demanding change or claiming we aren't heading on the right path of progress. It's much less the case of his argument being so strong we must accept it and more just it confirms previous beliefs for some.

[joeyj]

Pinker is a professional reassure-er. As a lifelong pessimist, I find him irritating, since he's making people think things are getting better, NOT that we're circling the drain...

[MilkoWay]

You clearly didn't read the book, or if you did, you didn't understand it. The main hypothesis of the book is not that people got less violent because they became more rational. It rather conveys the idea that a set of exogenous forces, that are sequentially dependent, transformed human behavior, and those changes leaded to less violence overall. The increase in rational thinking as a factor doesn't explain all, and he never claimed that in the book.

[shirehorse]

Rebecca, I haven't read anything that refutes Pinkers claims, including this video, that isn't a straw man.  Pinker's claims are standard anthropology. We have extensive work, which is backed by history and archaeology, that support Pinker's claims.  These have been debated for a very long time and you would need a large number of anthropologist, historians, and archaeologist publishing articles in peer sources to change the consensus.

[hugo-garcia]

Is Incredible how you are always right. University professors are wrong, PHD's are worng but you are right. Amazing. Why no one can see it ? Why only you can see it ?

[alvodin]

Pinker doesn't know what a hunter Gatherer is, also he included deaths done to hunter gatherers by wars with Western imperialists. What a genuine guy!

[jlrinc]

America just gets more and more peaceful with every mass shooting!

[EpicEventsPartyRentals]

The world's getting better on most fronts. I agree with Pinker.

[bwatson]

I don't agree with Pinker on everything, but I didn't hear a very compelling arguments as to why Pinker is wrong in his claim that violence has declined in the world. Even if its only because population sizes have become larger, that's not a refutation of his point that an average person has a much lower chance of becoming a victim of violence than in past societies.

Even if there are methodological problems with his research as you claim, that doesn't necessarily mean his entire argument is wrong.

Also doesn't the fact that notions that would have been unthinkable in earlier societies, concepts like Human Rights, give qualitative merit to his claims?

[TMMx]

That's a compelling rebuttal to his argument about wartime deaths, but I wonder what you think about his hypothesis about the decline in violent crime from the early 90s to today. He argues that a major influence was what he calls the "rights revolutions." He believes that the civil rights movement, the womens' rights movement, the gay rights movement, etc, have made people more aware of other people's hardship and as a result, they are more conscientious about avoiding harming others.

[nicholasreid]

Interesting that this has to end with a rather snarky and childish ad hominem argument about how the guy looks. I'm undecided about the validity of Pinker's argument, but this messy response certainly hasn't cleared the matter up.

[psychologicalpsocks]

As a big fan of the book (not the man), I'm eager to hear these counter-arguments. unfortunately, the only one you mentioned specifically does not refute Steven Pinker's claims. All it does is add nuance to his argument, which is what new data does to correct theories.

Oh well, I guess I'll just have to google it myself. But I would like to see a more detailed video on the subject from you. And also what are your thoughts on theories of violence that hold up, and how do you think we can achieve a more peaceful world? If you don't know the answers to these questions, can you elaborate on what we do and do not know, and why.

I'm off to do some research, thank you for letting me know that the theory of violence popularized by Steven Pinker is not settled fact as I thought it was.

[luislute]

I don't believe Pinker mentions humans "evolving" to be less violent. He just states that, according to data and in percentage, less people die in today's world than in medieval times or in hunter gatherer groups. Whether the data is reliable or not, I don't know, but it seems that you're actually saying the same thing as he is in this point.

[TMMx]

The weirdest thing about Pinker's book is the total absence of any mention of the effects of lead. At first I thought it might be because he doesn't agree that laws regulating lead had any influence on crime rates, but he does mention other hypotheses that he disagrees with, so even if he disagrees with the lead hypothesis, it's really weird that he doesn't bring it up.

[rstevewarmorycom]

It's not so much that you're not sometimes right, slightly, it's that you couch it in so much hate. There's something wrong inside you, I don't think you're really capable of liking anybody. Then you wonder why people hate you.