Pinker is one of nine recipients of this year's Dr. Jean Mayer Global Citizenship Award, an honor that is traditionally presented at the EPIIC symposium to individuals who have demonstrated the values of scholarship, research and teaching in order to solve global issues.
Pinker spoke about the findings on which his newest book, "The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined," is based.
"I hope to persuade you that [the decline of violence] is a persistent historical development," he said.
He listed the psychological mechanisms and historical changes that have contributed to this decline.
Pinker explained that the world has simply become a more peaceful and civilized place due to what he called the pacification and civilizing processes. Rates of death from war have fallen from 50 percent in prehistoric societies to several tenths of one percent worldwide in 2005.
Another contributor is what Pinker called the humanitarian revolution, which includes waning use of the death penalty and the abolition of capital punishment by most major countries.
Also important are what Pinker calls the Long Peace and New Peace, which are declining trends in length and frequency of wars as well as rates of death from war.
"We used to have things like the Thirty Years' War and the Eighty Years' War," he said. "More recently we've had the Six-Day War."
Finally, Pinker described what he calls the Rights Revolution, which is the disappearance of violence on a smaller scale against racial minorities, women, children and animals.
"Why has violence declined on so many scales of time and magnitude?" he said. "Human nature is extraordinarily complex."
Pinker listed four motivators possibly responsible for this drop.
First, he referenced Thomas Hobbes' "Leviathan," explaining the theory that a state with a monopoly on violence can neutralize the incentive to attack itself or its neighbors.
Second, he explained the gentle commerce theory, stating that increased global trade incentivizes peace because trading is more advantageous than invading.
Third, he talked about the expanding circle theory, and that due to literacy, travel and cosmopolitanism, people are generally empathetic to wider circles of people than they used to be.
Fourth, he mentioned the escalator of reason, meaning that due to literacy, education and public discourse, people think more abstractly and universally, and therefore recognize the futility of cycles of violence.
"How do we put the psychology and history together?" Pinker asked. "Ultimately, violence is a social dilemma. All parties are better off if all parties agree to abjure violence."
The speech was followed by an interview with renowned journalist Christopher Lydon, former host of National Public Radio's "The Connection," as well as a question-and-answer session with the audience.
In an interview with the Daily, Lydon explained that while Pinker's hypothesis is rooted in quantitative research, the aggregate numbers do not account for the fear and emotions engendered by violent acts.
"He says flat out that you can't understand history without a quantitative approach, counting all sorts of things — his case especially war and death," he said. "But what if the quantitative measures are not the best ones? People who remember World War II are kind of baffled by [Pinker's] book — how, so soon after World War II, can you imagine a less violent world?"
