Pascal Boyer

Washington University in St. Louis | WUSTL , Wash U · Department of Psychology

Commentators discussed the coherence and validity of a minimalist approach to ownership intuitions, in ways that make it possible to clarify the model, re-evaluate its cognitive underpinnings, and sketch some of its implications. This response summarizes the model; addresses issues concerning the need for a special technical lexicon when describing...

Standard approaches to cultural evolution focus on the recipients or consumers. This does not take into account the fitness costs incurred in producing the behaviors or artifacts that become cultural, i.e., widespread in a social group. We argue that cultural evolution models should focus on these fitness costs and benefits of cultural production p...

Beliefs play a central role in our lives. They lie at the heart of what makes us human, they shape the organization and functioning of our minds, they define the boundaries of our culture, and they guide our motivation and behavior. Given their central importance, researchers across a number of disciplines have studied beliefs, leading to results a...

Ownership is universal and ubiquitous in human societies, yet the psychology underpinning ownership intuitions is generally not described in a coherent and computationally tractable manner. Ownership intuitions are commonly assumed to derive from culturally transmitted social norms, or from a mentally represented implicit theory. While the social n...

Explanations of misfortune are the object of much cultural discourse in most human societies. Recurrent themes include the intervention of superhuman agents (gods, ancestors, etc.), witchcraft, karma, and the violation of specific rules or ‘taboos’. In modern large‐scale societies, people often respond by blaming the victims of, for example, accide...

Folk-sociology is a set of intuitive assumptions that organize our spontaneous theories about society, including the notion that social groups are agent-like. Pietraszewski's model may explain this folk-sociological assumption in an elegant way. However, large-scale group dynamics include features that seem to escape agent-like descriptions. Theref...

This book brings together dozens of the world’s leading scholars in memory studies to explore national memory in an age of populism. Drawing on disciplines ranging from cognitive science to history, these scholars address issues such as how memory is tied to individual and collective identity, how national pasts create political presents, and how a...

This edited volume represents a snapshot the current state cognitive science of religion with contributions from many well-established contributors to the field as well as a few newcomers. The first section broadly sets the historical and theoretical stage. Its three chapters introduce readers to the historical, theoretical, and methodological foun...

The emergence of a cognitive science of religion has revolutionized our understanding of the processes whereby humans acquire and transmit representations of gods, spirits, and other superhuman agents. To advance even further, the discipline should address the ambiguities concerning two crucial questions. One is the assimilation, under the umbrella...

Religions “in the wild” are the varied set of religious activities that occurred before the emergence of organized religions with doctrines, or that persist at the margins of those organized traditions. These religious activities mostly focus on misfortune; on how to remedy specific cases of illness, accidents, failures; and on how to prevent them....

This volume brings together a collection of seven articles previously published by the author, with a new introduction reframing the articles in the context of past and present questions in anthropology, psychology and human evolution. It promotes the perspective of ‘integrated’ social science, in which social science questions are addressed in a d...

This volume brings together a collection of seven articles previously published by the author, with a new introduction reframing the articles in the context of past and present questions in anthropology, psychology and human evolution. It promotes the perspective of ‘integrated’ social science, in which social science questions are addressed in a d...

This volume brings together a collection of seven articles previously published by the author, with a new introduction reframing the articles in the context of past and present questions in anthropology, psychology and human evolution. It promotes the perspective of ‘integrated’ social science, in which social science questions are addressed in a d...

This volume brings together a collection of seven articles previously published by the author, with a new introduction reframing the articles in the context of past and present questions in anthropology, psychology and human evolution. It promotes the perspective of ‘integrated’ social science, in which social science questions are addressed in a d...

This volume brings together a collection of seven articles previously published by the author, with a new introduction reframing the articles in the context of past and present questions in anthropology, psychology and human evolution. It promotes the perspective of ‘integrated’ social science, in which social science questions are addressed in a d...

This volume brings together a collection of seven articles previously published by the author, with a new introduction reframing the articles in the context of past and present questions in anthropology, psychology and human evolution. It promotes the perspective of ‘integrated’ social science, in which social science questions are addressed in a d...

In many human societies, truth-making institutions are considered necessary to establish an officially valid or “received” description of some specific situation. These range from divination, oaths, and ordeals to judicial torture or trial by jury. In many cases, these institutions may seem odd or paradoxical, e.g., why would an ordeal reveal a def...

Ritual is not a proper scientific object, as the term is used to denote disparate forms of behaviour, on the basis of a faint family resemblance. Indeed, a variety of distinct cognitive mechanisms are engaged, in various combinations, in the diverse interactions called ‘rituals’ – and each of these mechanisms deserves study, in terms of its evoluti...

In contrast to language or technology, many “symbolic” cultural phenomena do not seem to confer immediate fitness benefits. Standard approaches to cultural evolution in this domain focus on the recipients or consumers, which does not explain why these phenomena emerge. As a solution, we propose to consider the fitness costs and benefits incurred in...

Evolutionary approaches to religious representations must be grounded in a precise description of the forms of religious activity that occurred before the emergence of state societies and doctrinal religious organizations. These informal religious activities or “wild traditions” consist of services provided by individual specialists, with no formal...

Why are our intuitive beliefs about economic issues often so misguided, asks psychologist Pascal Boyer

Specific features of our evolved cognitive architecture explain why some aspects of the economy are “seen” and others are “not seen.” Drawing from the commentaries of economists, psychologists, and other social scientists on our original proposal, we propose a more precise model of the acquisition and spread of folk-beliefs about the economy. In pa...

Singh provides the skeletal elements of a possible account of shamanism-like beliefs in many human societies. To be developed into a proper theory, this model needs to be supplemented at several crucial points, in terms of anthropological evidence, psychological processes, and cultural transmission.

Research on social transmission suggests that people preferentially transmit information about threats and social interactions. Such biases might be driven by the arousal that is experienced as part of the emotional response triggered by information about threats or social relationships. The current studies tested whether preferences for transmitti...

The domain of “folk-economics” consists in explicit beliefs about the economy held by laypeople, untrained in economics, about such topics as e.g., the causes of the wealth of nations, the benefits or drawbacks of markets and international trade, the effects of regulation, the origins of inequality, the connection between work and wages, the econom...

Many rumors convey information about potential danger, even when these dangers are very unlikely. In four studies, we examine whether micro-processes of cultural transmission explain the spread of threat-related information. Three studies using transmission chain protocols suggest a) that there is indeed a preference for the deliberate transmission...

Humans might have a propensity to associate a collective of multiple outgroup males with threat, even in the context of minimally defined groups. We tested this hypothesis using a fear-conditioning paradigm (Study 1) and a signal detection paradigm (Study 2). Results of Study 1 suggest that stimuli showing ingroup males are more easily associated w...

Homophobia encompasses a variety of attitudes and behaviors with distinct causal paths. We focus on aggressive homophobia, a propensity to feel anger and express aggression toward gay men. We investigated the conjecture that homosexual males might be seen, in recent Western cultures, as defectors from collective group defense. We predicted that con...

Religion has been a subject of study for centuries, with scholars approaching this topic from a plethora of perspectives. Applying an evolutionary perspective to the study of religion represents a relatively new approach, and yet the last few decades have seen an impressive collection of hypotheses developed and empirical findings gathered from thi...

The proposed narrative relies on an anachronistic projection of current religions onto prehistorical and historical cultures that were not concerned with prosocial morality or with public statement of belief. Prosocial morality appeared in wealthier post-Axial environments. Public demonstrations of belief are possible and advantageous when religiou...

Evolutionary reasoning and empirical evidence converge to suggest that knowledge of the natural and social world is supported by domain-specific neurocognitive systems, organized around recurrent adaptive challenges. In the past, understanding of such functional specialization has been obscured by confusing debates on innateness and modularity. We...

The ‘Axial Age’ (500–300 BCE) refers to the period during which most of the main religious and spiritual traditions emerged in Eurasian societies. Although the Axial Age has recently been the focus of increasing interest,1-5View all references its existence is still very much in dispute. The main reason for questioning the existence of the Axial Ag...

Contact between people from different groups triggers specific individual- and group-level responses, ranging from attitudes and emotions to welfare and health outcomes. Standard social psychological perspectives do not yet provide an integrated, causal model of these phenomena. As an alternative, we describe a coalitional perspective. Human psycho...

Information about potential danger is a central component of many rumors, urban legends, ritual prescriptions, religious prohibitions and witchcraft crazes. We investigate a potential factor in the cultural success of such material, namely that a source of threat-related information may be intuitively judged as more competent than a source that doe...

New essays by leading philosophers and cognitive scientists that present recent findings and theoretical developments in the study of concepts. The study of concepts has advanced dramatically in recent years, with exciting new findings and theoretical developments. Core concepts have been investigated in greater depth and new lines of inquiry have...

Between roughly 500 BCE and 300 BCE, three distinct regions, the Yangtze and Yellow River Valleys, the Eastern Mediterranean, and the Ganges Valley, saw the emergence of highly similar religious traditions with an unprecedented emphasis on self-discipline and asceticism and with "otherworldly," often moralizing, doctrines, including Buddhism, Jaini...

The association between threat perception and motor execution, mediated by evolved precaution systems, often results in ritual-like behavior, including many idiosyncratic acts that seem irrelevant to the task at hand. This study tested the hypothesis that threat-detection during performance of a risky motor task would result in idiosyncratic activi...

In this comment, we respond to comments raised by Eastwood (2012) in response to our article on the role of evolutionary psychology in understanding institutions (Boyer and Petersen, 2012). We discuss how evolutionary psychological models account for cultural variation and change in institutions, how sociological institutionalism and evolutionary m...

Religious beliefs apparently challenge our view of human cognition as an evolved system that provides reliable information about environments. We propose that properties of religious beliefs are best understood in terms of a dual-processing model, in which a variety of evolved domain-specific systems provide stable intuitions, whereas other systems...

Moralizing religions, unlike religions with morally indifferent gods or spirits, appeared only recently in some (but not all) large-scale human societies. A crucial feature of these new religions is their emphasis on proportionality (between deeds and supernatural rewards, between sins and penance, and in the formulation of the Golden Rule, accordi...

Motor behaviours typically include acts that may seem irrelevant for the goal of the task. These unnecessary idiosyncratic acts are excessively manifested in certain activities, such as sports or compulsive rituals. Using the shared performance (commonness) of acts as a proxy for their relevance to the current task, we analysed motor behaviour in d...

Standard measures of generalized trust in others are often taken to provide reliable indicators of economic attitudes in different countries. Here we compared three highly distinct groups, in Kenya, China and the US, in terms of more specific attitudes, [a] people's willingness to invest in the future, [b] their willingness to invest in others, and...

Theoretical discount curves for different values of the discount factor k used to generate the five different amounts offered at each specific delay in the delay-discounting task. (TIF)

(DOCX)

Deficits in episodic memory are associated with deficits in the ability to imagine future experiences (i.e., mental time travel). We show that K.C., a person with episodic amnesia and an inability to imagine future experiences, nonetheless systematically discounts the value of future rewards, and his discounting is within the range of controls in t...

Most standard social science accounts only offer limited explanations of institutional design, i.e. why institutions have common features observed in many different human groups. Here we suggest that these features are best explained as the outcome of evolved human cognition, in such domains as mating, moral judgment and social exchange. As empiric...

Claude Lévi-Strauss was arguably the most prominent anthropologist of the twentieth century, certainly one who went further than most in renewing our understanding of universal constraints on human cultures. Surprisingly, his findings and theories have had very little influence on contemporary accounts of religion. This I would contend stems from t...

How does the community of social scientists actually decide that a certain research program counts as a contribution to social science? On what criteria? The opposition between scientific and nonscientific modes, or perhaps humanities versus science is too simple, and there are in fact three clearly distinct ideal types here. These are referred to...

Evidence for developmental aspects of fear-targets and anxiety suggests a complex but stable pattern whereby specific kinds of fears emerge at different periods of development. This developmental schedule seems appropriate to dangers encountered repeatedly during human evolution. Also consistent with evolutionary perspective, the threat-detection s...

How do people detect mental dysfunction? What is the influence of cultural models of dysfunction on this detection process? The detection process as such is not usually researched as it falls between the domains of cross-cultural psychiatry (focusing on the dysfunction itself) and anthropological ethno-psychiatry (focusing on cultural models of 10...

Pascal Boyer assesses what science has to say about morals.

This contribution is part of a special issue on History and Human Nature, comprising an essay by G.E.R. Lloyd and fifteen invited responses.

J. Henrich et al. (“Markets, religion, community size, and the evolution of fairness and punishment,” Research Articles, 19 March, p. [1480][1]) have shown that market integration and participation in world religion covary with fairness. The authors suggest that their results support cultural

Our daily activities are comprised of motor routines, which are behavioral templates with specific goals, typically performed in an automatic fixed manner and without much conscious attention. Such routines can seem to resemble pathologic rituals that dominate the motor behavior of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and autistic patients. This res...

A large amount of research in cognitive psychology is focused on memory distortions, understood as deviations from various (largely implicit) standards. Many alleged distortions actually suggest a highly functional system that balances the cost of acquiring new information with the benefit of relevant, contextually appropriate decision-making. In t...

What is memory for? The easy and spontaneous answer is that “memory is for storing information about the past,” “memory helps us preserve past events,” and variations on that theme. But what is the point of that? Why should any organism have that kind of a capacity? What good is it? Surprisingly, this is not a topic that has received much attention...

This chapter is about the cultural memory and transmission of oral traditions, especially those that use poetics and music. The latter include many of the best studied and most stable forms of oral traditions, including children rhymes, ballads, songs, and epic poetry. Oral traditions are of interest because, unlike written traditions, they depend...

Why this particular collection? There is a tide in the affairs of memory, which we thought we should take at the flood. The study of memory in cognitive psychology – one of the most venerable traditions of the discipline – has grown by leaps and bounds in the last twenty years, providing us with new tools and models, from the neural foundations of...

Such responses make it difficult to establish why and how religious thought is so pervasive in human societies - an understanding that is especially relevant in the current climate of religious fundamentalism. Findings from cognitive psychology, neuroscience, cultural anthropology and archaeology promise to change our view of religion. Just as visu...

Ritualized behavior is characteristic of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), but it is also observed in other, nonclinical contexts such as children's routines and cultural ceremonies. Such behaviors are best understood with reference to a set of human vigilance–precaution systems in charge of monitoring potential danger and motivating the organ...

What is the function of our capacity for 'mental time travel'? Evolutionary considerations suggest that vivid memory and imaginative foresight may be crucial cognitive devices for human decision making. Our emotional engagement with past or future events gives them great motivational force, which may counter a natural tendency towards time discount...

Recent work in biology, cognitive psychology, and archaeology has renewed evolutionary perspectives on the role of natural selection in the emergence and recurrent forms of religious thought and behavior, i.e., mental representations of supernatural agents, as well as artifacts, ritual practices, moral systems, ethnic markers, and specific experien...

“Acquired culture” depends on social transmission and displays salient cross-cultural variability. It seems unconnected to adaptive fitness. It is, however, constrained by evolved properties of the mind. Recurrent—not necessarily universal—features of acquired culture can be explained by taking into account the early development and constraining po...

We usually consider imagination in terms of its high-end, creative products like literature, religion and the arts. To understand the evolution of imaginative capacities in humans, it makes more sense to focus on humble imaginations that are generally automatic and largely unconscious, and help us produce representations of, e.g. what people will s...

Ritualized behavior, intuitively recognizable by its stereotypy, rigidity, repetition, and apparent lack of rational motivation, is found in a variety of life conditions, customs, and everyday practices: in cultural rituals, whether religious or non-religious; in many children's complicated routines; in the pathology of obsessive-compulsive disorde...

Let me start with a list of difficult problems in the explanation of human behavior, particularly of human culture. The point of this essay is to outline and advocate a new way of doing social science and explaining culture, which, for want of a better term, I call an integrated behavioral science that ignores the (generally deceptive) divisions be...

Traducción de: Religion Explained. The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought Boyer, psicólogo y antropólogo sociocultural, explica la existencia del fenómeno religioso, a partir del funcionamiento general de la mente humana, en cuanto receptor y organizador de la información. El propósito es proporcionar los elementos para comprender el origen...

We propose a neuro-cognitive model of the recurrent features of Ritu-alized Behavior (stereotypy, rigidity in performance, sense of urgency) and the re-current themes of collective rituals (potential danger from contamination, preda-tion, social hazard). This can only be explained if we consider the broader domain of ritualized behaviour, present i...

In reply to commentary on our target article, we supply further evidence and hypotheses in the description of ritualized behaviors in humans. Reactions to indirect fitness threats probably activate specialized precaution systems rather than a unified form of danger-avoidance or causal reasoning. Impairment of precaution systems may be present in pa...

Bering argues that belief in posthumous intentional agency may confer added fitness via the inhibition of opportunistic behavior. This is true only if these agents are interested parties in our moral choices, a feature which does not result from Bering's imaginative constraint hypothesis and extends to supernatural agents other than dead people's s...

Children's learning--in the domains of science and religion specifically, but in many other cultural domains as well--relies extensively on testimony and other forms of culturally transmitted information. The cognitive processes that enable such learning must also administrate the evaluation, qualification, and storage of that information, while gu...

Reply by the current authors to the comments on the original article(see record 2007-04201-022). In reply to commentary on our target article, we supply further evidence and hypotheses in the description of ritualized behaviors in humans. Reactions to indirect fitness threats probably activate specialized precaution systems rather than a unified fo...

This essay offers an evolutionary explanation of religion, in particular, religious mental concepts. Boyer argues that the human "mind-brain" consists of multiple systems that guide understanding and action in different realms. Although none of these is specific to religion, several may be connected to religious concepts, and some concepts may be m...

Interaction with imagined non-physical agents (gods, spirits, ghosts, etc. ) is a puzzling cultural universal, as it is of no straightforward adaptive value, indeed is often costly to individuals or groups. One promising research strategy is to evalu-ate to what extent religious concepts and norms may be a by-product of evolved brain function (Boye...

Pascal Boyer and Clark Barrett offer an extended argument for domain specificity, using intuitive ontology--adaptations for different domains of information--as a vehicle for illuminating the tight integration of neural, developmental, and behavioral components of evolved psychological mechanisms. They document evidence from cognitive psychology an...

Traditionally, psychologists have assumed that people come equipped only with a set of relatively domain-general faculties, such as "memory" and "reasoning," which are applied in equal fashion to diverse problems. Recent research has begun to suggest that human expertise about the natural and social environment, including what is often called "sema...

Comments on an article by Sousa (see record 2004-12540-001). Paulo Sousa makes a strong case for applying the best anthropological models of cultural transmission (epidemiological models) to anthropology itself, to the ways in which anthropologists' choices of topics and methods have changed. Sousa's model of how kinship got gradually pushed away f...

Contingencies between objects and people can be mechanical or intentional-social in nature. In this fMRI study we used simplified stimuli to investigate brain regions involved in the detection of mechanical and intentional contingencies. Using a factorial design we manipulated the 'animacy' and 'contingency' of stimulus movement, and the subject's...

Jesse Bering's study of dead-agent concepts and their implications is an excellent example of the kind of careful experiment that ought to underpin theoretical claims about cultural knowledge, its organisation and its spread. I will focus on three issues that Bering emphasised in his discussion: Are ghost-concepts intuitive? Are they endemic rather...

Religious concepts activate various functionally distinct mental systems, present also in non-religious contexts, and 'tweak' the usual inferences of these systems. They deal with detection and representation of animacy and agency, social exchange, moral intuitions, precaution against natural hazards and understanding of misfortune. Each of these a...

Contingencies between objects and people can be mechanical or intentional–social in nature. In this fMRI study we used simplified stimuli to investigate brain regions involved in the detection of mechanical and intentional contingencies. Using a factorial design we manipulated the 'animacy' and 'contingency' of stimulus movement, and the subject's...

Detection of the causal relationships between events is fundamental for understanding the world around us. We report an event-related fMRI study designed to investigate how the human brain processes the perception of mechanical causality. Subjects were presented with mechanically causal events (in which a ball collides with and causes movement of a...

Presents results of free-recall experiments conducted in France, Gabon and Nepal, to test predictions of a cognitive model of religious concepts. The world over, these concepts include violations of conceptual expectations at the level of domain knowledge (e.g., about ‘animal’ or ‘artifact’ or ‘person’) rather than at the basic level. In five studi...