The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

By Steven Pinker. 2002

2,531 citations recorded by the source corpus.

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a1965c3ec240d1841300df9226fa389fa3117be7

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Citations in the corpus

The Ape That Thought It Was a Peacock: Does Evolutionary Psychology Exaggerate Human Sex Differences? (2013, background): “For much of the 20th century, the blank slate view was the dominant view in the social sciences (Pinker, 2002; Tooby & Cosmides, 1992).”
Identifying and explaining apparent universal sex differences in cognition and behavior (2011, background): “At least since the writings of Margaret Mead (1935/1950, 1949/ 1968), many social scientists have assumed that human sex roles are highly flexible, subject almost entirely to the expectations and dictates of the particular culture in which one happens to live (Pinker, 2002).”
The Genetic and Environmental Origins of Learning Abilities and Disabilities in the Early School (2007, background): “Indeed, if we were all identical there would be no need for a legal equality because its purpose is to ensure equality of treatment despite our differences (Pinker, 2002).”
Autonomy in Language Learning (2006, background): “Firstly, from the fields of psychology and philosophy where questions have been raised about the construct of autonomy that arise from studies of human behaviour, for example in the field of behaviourism and reductionist neuroscience (Pinker, 2002; Skinner, 1977) as well as from studies on non-consc”
Women’s Managerial Aspirations (2014, background): “That is, we designed a study to explore women’s managerial aspirations not as a natural choice women make (e.g., Pinker, 2002, and the third explanation above) but from an organizational development perspective.”
Social intuitionists answer six questions about moral psychology. (2008, background): “Nobody in psychology today admits to believing in the blank slate, although as Pinker (2002) has shown, in practice many psychologists stay as close to the blank slate as they can, often closer than the evidence allows.”
Social Dominance Theory: Its Agenda and Method (2004, unknown): “is devoted to trying to deepen our understanding of the recurrent realities of actual human existence, including the universal realities of patriarchy, ethnocentrism, and dominance/submission (see Brown, 1991; Pinker, 2002).”
Cultural recycling of cortical maps. (2007, unknown): “…of the ‘‘standard social science model’’ shared by many anthropologists, sociologists, and some psychologists (see Barkow et al., 1992; and chapter 2 in Pinker, 2002), but also some neuroscientists who view the cortical surface as ‘‘largely equipotential and free of domain-specific structure’’…”
Darwinism, behavioral genetics, and organizational behavior: A review and agenda for future research. (2006, background): “Even evolutionary psychologists from the ‘strong’ adaptationist camp have begun to incorporate behavior genetics findings into their theorizing (Pinker, 2002).”