Pascal Robert Boyer is a Franco-American cognitive anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist, mostly known for his work in the cognitive science of religion. He studied at université Paris-Nanterre and Cambridge, and taught at the

University of Cambridge The University of Cambridge is a Public university, public collegiate university, collegiate research university in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1209, the University of Cambridge is the List of oldest universities in continuous operation, wo ...

for eight years, before taking up the position of Henry Luce Professor of Individual and Collective Memory at Washington University in St. Louis, where he teaches classes on

evolutionary psychology Evolutionary psychology is a theoretical approach in psychology that examines cognition and behavior from a modern evolutionary perspective. It seeks to identify human psychological adaptations with regard to the ancestral problems they evolved ...

and

anthropology Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity, concerned with human behavior, human biology, cultures, society, societies, and linguistics, in both the present and past, including archaic humans. Social anthropology studies patterns of behav ...

. He was a

Guggenheim Fellow Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, endowed by the late Simon and Olga Hirsh Guggenheim. These awards are bestowed upon individuals who have demonstrated d ...

and a visiting professor at the

University of California, Santa Barbara The University of California, Santa Barbara (UC Santa Barbara or UCSB) is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Santa Barbara County, California, United States. Tracing its roots back to 1891 as an ...

and the University of Lyon, France. He studied

philosophy Philosophy ('love of wisdom' in Ancient Greek) is a systematic study of general and fundamental questions concerning topics like existence, reason, knowledge, Value (ethics and social sciences), value, mind, and language. It is a rational an ...

and

University of Paris The University of Paris (), known Metonymy, metonymically as the Sorbonne (), was the leading university in Paris, France, from 1150 to 1970, except for 1793–1806 during the French Revolution. Emerging around 1150 as a corporation associated wit ...

and

Cambridge Cambridge ( ) is a List of cities in the United Kingdom, city and non-metropolitan district in the county of Cambridgeshire, England. It is the county town of Cambridgeshire and is located on the River Cam, north of London. As of the 2021 Unit ...

, with

Jack Goody Sir John Rankine Goody (27 July 1919 – 16 July 2015) was an English social anthropologist. He was a prominent lecturer at Cambridge University, and was William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology from 1973 to 1984. Among his main publica ...

, working on memory constraints on the transmission of oral literature. Boyer is a Member of th
American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Work

Pascal Boyer, an anthropologist of French origin, studies how human biases and cognitive faculties have resulted in or encouraged cultural phenomena. He advocates the idea that human evolution resulted in specialized capacities that guide our

social relation A social relation is the fundamental unit of analysis within the social sciences, and describes any voluntary or involuntary interpersonal relationship between two or more conspecifics within and/or between groups. The group can be a language or ...

culture Culture ( ) is a concept that encompasses the social behavior, institutions, and Social norm, norms found in human societies, as well as the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, Social norm, customs, capabilities, Attitude (psychology), attitudes ...

, and predilections toward

religious belief A belief is a subjective attitude that something is true or a state of affairs is the case. A subjective attitude is a mental state of having some stance, take, or opinion about something. In epistemology, philosophers use the term "belief ...

s. Boyer and others propose that these cognitive mechanisms make the acquisition of “religious” themes, like concepts of spirits, ghosts, ancestors or gods, highly transmissible within a community. Boyer has conducted long-term ethnographic fieldwork in

Cameroon Cameroon, officially the Republic of Cameroon, is a country in Central Africa. It shares boundaries with Nigeria to the west and north, Chad to the northeast, the Central African Republic to the east, and Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, and the R ...

, where he studied the transmission of Fang oral epics and its traditional religion. Most of his later work consists of an experimental study of cognitive capacities underlying

cultural transmission Cultural learning is the way a group of people or animals within a society or culture tend to learn and pass on information. Learning styles can be greatly influenced by how a culture socializes with its children and young people. Cross-cultural ...

. He also conducted studies on supernatural concepts and their retention in memory and a general description of cognitive processes involved in the transmission of religious concepts. More recently, he has written on the concept of Folk economics, which proposes that evolved cognitive biases play an important role in how laypeople view the economy.

''Religion Explained''

Of Boyer's books, '' Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought'' is the best known. Boyer introduced

cognitive anthropology Cognitive anthropology is a subfield of anthropology influenced by Linguistic anthropology, cultural anthropology, and biological anthropology in which scholars seek to explain patterns of shared knowledge, cultural innovation, and transmission ...

, which provided a new understanding of religion. Religion for Boyer consists of cultural representations, that is, ideas that appear in roughly similar forms in the minds of different individuals in a group. To explain how religion emerges and is transmitted, we must explain how these ideas are acquired, stored and transmitted better than other possible ideas. Findings from cognitive and developmental psychology suggest that some combinations of ideas are particularly easy to acquire and remember. Among these, we find many standard themes of supernatural and religious imagination, such as the notion of an agent with counter-intuitive physics and standard psychology, e.g. ghosts and gods that are not material but have the same mental capacities as humans. According to Boyer, there are only a few such combinations of intuitive and counter-intuitive material that are optimal for acquisition and memory - and these happen to be the most frequent ones in the world's religions. In this cognitive paradigm belief in ''supernatural agents'' is natural and part of human cognition. However, religion is not "special". That is, there are no specific mental systems that create religious ideas. Rather, these ideas are an expected by-product of mental systems that evolved for other reasons, not for religion. For instance, we easily entertain the notion of a "god" or "ghost" because of our intuitive psychology, what psychologists sometimes call "

Theory of Mind In psychology and philosophy, theory of mind (often abbreviated to ToM) refers to the capacity to understand other individuals by ascribing mental states to them. A theory of mind includes the understanding that others' beliefs, desires, intent ...

". Justin L. Barrett has argued that Boyer’s book, ''The Naturalness of Religious Ideas: A Cognitive Theory of Religion'' is an attempt to reform traditional models and allow understanding religion in terms of cognitive science. Boyer dismantles many traditional assumptions of cultural studies. However, Barrett claims, Boyer lacks clarity – mostly due to the shift in anthropological to psychological jargon.

''Minds Make Societies''

In this book, Boyer explains the relevance of evolutionary psychology and cultural evolution to understanding human societies, from the small-scale communities in which humans evolved to modern mass-societies. The blurb states that the book "integrates insights from evolutionary biology, genetics, psychology, economics, and more to explore the development and workings of human societies". In Boyer's view, this new integrated social science can provide new answers, based on scientific evidence, to important questions about society. Each of the six chapters in the book focuses on one of these questions: (1) Why do humans favor their own group?, (2) Why do people communicate so much wrong information (rumors, superstition, etc.)?, (3) Why are there religions?, (4) What is the natural family?, (5) How can societies be just? and (6) Can human minds understand human societies? One running theme in the book is that social sciences can progress if they abandon "chimerical" notions like "nature" and "culture", that do not correspond to anything in the world, and rather consider how the particular history of natural selection in the human line resulted in specific preferences and capacities. Social scientists should also abandon classical assumptions that name problems instead of solving them, like the idea that power is similar to a force, or that social norms exist outside the heads of human beings. Boyer recommends the kind of "consilient" social science outlined by E. O. Wilson, and he argues that we already have the elements of such a social science, as illustrated in his book.

Books

* *
Cognitive Aspects Of Religious Symbolism
'' Edited by Pascal Boyer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1992. * *'' Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought'' (2001) Basic Books. . **Translated into Greek as ''Και ο Άνθρωπος Έπλασε τους Θεούς,'' by Dimitris Xygalatas and Nikolas Roubekas (). **Translated into Polish as “I człowiek stworzył bogów… Jak powstała religia?” (). **Translated into Russian as "Объясняя религию. Природа религиозного мышления" () *
Memory in Mind and Culture
'' Edited by Pascal Boyer and James V. Wertsch. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2009. *
The Fracture of an Illusion: Science and the Dissolution of Religion
'. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht August 23, 2010. * ''Minds Make Societies'', New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018 ().

Notes and references

External links