Pascal Boyer -Articles

Abstract: Do children have religious beliefs, and in what ways are they different from adult ones? Clearly, the question is of interest to anthropologists who need to understand how religious representations are acquired and therefore how cultural assumptions are transmitted from generation to generation. It is also important for developmental psychology. What children grasp of religious concepts and beliefs may illuminate how they build complex conceptual structures on the basis of limited input. Surprisingly, studies of the development of religious concepts are still few and far between. They are not really satisfactory either, for two reasons. One is that such studies often apply to developmental phenomena views of adult religious concepts that have no sound cognit`ive basis. Another reason is that such studies generally ignore a wealth of anthropological material concerning the diversity as well as recurrent features of religious concepts. This is why the first part of this chapter deals with religious representations in adults, introducing a cognitive framework based on anthropological evidence. We then argue that this framework makes it possible to evaluate the relevance of recent developmental evidence to an understanding of religious concepts, and to specify in what ways children's religious concepts differ from the adult version.

Pascal Boyer	Selected Articles Cultural Transmission and Memory Systems
Boyer P, Parren N (2015) Threat-related information suggests competence: A possible factor in the spread of rumors, PLoS ONE xx: xxx-xxx. Click here for draft version [pdf].	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 does not convey such information. In five studies, we asked participants to judge which of two sources of information, only one of which conveyed threat-related information, was more knowledgeable. Results suggest that mention of potential danger makes a source appear more competent than others, that the effect is not due to a general negativity bias, and that it concerns competence rather than a more generally positive evaluation of the source.
Boyer P (2015) How Natural Selection Shapes Conceptual Structure: Human Intuitions and Concepts of Ownership, in S Laurence & E Margolis (Eds.), The Conceptual Mind. New Directions in the Study of Concepts, Cambridge, MA; The MIT Press, pp. 185-200. Click here for proofs [pdf].	How do we map the inventory of human concepts? Here I propose that a precise description of selective pressures on species-specific cognitive systems is the best source of empirical hypotheses about conceptual repertoires, and I illustrate this in the case of ownership concepts. The example of ownership illustrates how a highly specific selective context can predict and explain equally specific aspects of human concepts. Oownership as a conceptual domain is part of our responses to the adaptive challenge of reaching a measure of coordination that optimizes the extraction of resources.This account also suggests more general though tentative lessons, to do with what general computational properties, if any, should be expected from concepts; whether categorization is crucial to concept structure; and what role concepts play in linguistic reference.
Boyer P (2013) Why 'Belief' is hard work: Implications of Tanya Luhrmann's When God Talks Back Hau, Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3(3): 349-57. Click here for proofs [pdf].	A consequence of our common evolved psychology is that most people, at most times, in most situations will not consider their gods real, in the sense of having a definite intuition of their presence. As Tanya Lurhmann's When God Talks Back (Luhrmann 2012) demonstrates, it requires considerable work to achieve an intuitive grasp of something—the actual presence of a god—that is reflectively accepted as certainly true. Tanya Luhrmann’s detailed monograph addresses the question, why belief, far from being a simple matter of receiving and accepting information, requires complex cognitive processes, some of which can be illuminated by meticulous ethnographic investigation.
Boyer, P & Petersen, MB (2011) The Naturalness of (many) social institutions Journal of Institutional Economics 8(1): 1–25. Click here for proofs [pdf].	Most standard social science accounts only offer limited accounts 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 empirical illustrations, we show how this evolved psychology makes marriage systems, legal norms and commons management systems, intuitively obvious and compelling, thereby ensuring their occurrence and cultural stability. We extend this to propose under what conditions institutions can become “natural”, compelling and legitimate, and outline probable paths for institutional change given human cognitive dispositions. Explaining institutions in terms of these exogenous factors also suggests that a general theory of institutions as such is neither necessary nor in fact possible. What is required are domain-specific accounts of institutional design in different domains of evolved cognition.
Boyer, P (2010) Intuitive Expectations & The Detection of Mental Disorder: A Cognitive Background To Folk-Psychiatries [forthcoming] Philosophical Psychology. Click here for draft version [pdf].	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 sanity and madness). Here we provide a general model for this “missing link” between behavior and cultural models, grounded in empirical evidence for intuitive psychology. Normal adult minds entertain specific intuitive expectations about mental function and behavior, and by implication they infer that specific kinds of behavior are the result of underlying dysfunction. This suggests that there is a “catalogue” of possible behaviors that trigger that intuition, hence a limited catalogue of possible symptoms that feed into culturally specific folk-understandings of mental disorder. It also suggests that some mental dysfunctions, as they do not clearly violate principles of intuitive psychology, are ‘invisible’ to folk-understandings. This perspective allows us to understand the cultural stability and spread of particular views of madness. It also suggests why certain types of mental disorder are “invisible” to folk-understandings.
Boyer P, (2010) Why Evolved Cognition Matters To Understanding Cultural Variation Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 35(3-4):377-87. Click here for draft version [pdf].	Geoffrey Lloyd's Cognitive variations: Reflections on the unity and diversity of the human mind seems to perpetuate a misleading description of the state of the role of cognition in culture. As a correction to that picture, it may be important to stress that evolution does not usually result in innate cognitive structures, that more learning requires more, not less, genetically specific structure, that most cognitive processes are not accessible to conscious inspection and therefore also to ethnographic investigation. It may also be of help to emphasize differences between two kinds of mental events, intuitive and reflective, that are sometimes confused in anthropological discussions of cognition and culture. I suggest that a more accurate description may help dispel various misunderstandings, about the connections between evolution and cognition, between evolved cognition and cultural representations, and about the need or value of certain kinds of anthropological relativism.u
Boyer, P (2009) What are memories for? Functions of recall in cognition and culture, in Boyer P & Wertsch JV (Eds), Memory in Mind and Culture, Camnridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 3-28. Click here for proofs [pdf].	What is memory for? Th e 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 from specialists of memory. Memories and fantasies make us feel, right now, all the consequences of our actions, by way of emotional rewards. So imagination and memories may well be functionally adaptive – not because they liberate us from down-to-earth, here-and-now cognition but, on the contrary, because they constrain our planning and decision making in efficient ways.
Boyer, P (2009) Cognitive predispositions and cultural transmission in Boyer P & Wertsch JV (Eds), Memory in Mind and Culture, Camnridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 288-319. Click here for proofs [pdf].	To what extent does cultural transmission require memory? If we understand “memory” in the ordinary sense of information about past situations that we can access and consider explicitly, the answer is that cultural transmission does not actually require much of that kind of memory. Once we understand memory, as psychologists do, as including processes beyond conscious inspection (Roediger, 1990), then memory really is the crux of cultural transmission. In the pages that follow, I will justify these statements on the basis of a few examples of cultural domains where the work of memory(in the wider sense) has been extensively studied.
Boyer, P (2009) Extending the range of adaptive misbelief: Memory “distortions” as functional features Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32(6): 513-4. Click here for draft version [pdf].	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 this sense many memories may be examples of functionally adaptive misbelief [as described in the target article by Ryan McKay & Daniel Dennett]
Boyer, P (2007) Specialised Inference Engines As Precursors Of Creative Imagination? in Ilona Roth (Ed.), Imaginative Minds, London, British Academy, pp 239-258 Click here for proofs [pdf].	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 say next, that people exist when out of sight, or what aspects of our environment are potentially dangerous. These examples suggest that there may not be one faculty of imagination but many specialised "what if" inferential systems in human minds.
Lienard, P & Boyer, P (2006) Whence Collective Ritual? A Cultural Selection Model of Ritualized Behavior, American Anthropologist 108: 814-827. Click here for pdf of draft version.	Ritualized behavior is a specific way of organizing the flow of action, characterized by stereotypy, rigidity in performance, a feeling of compulsion, and specific themes, in particular the potential danger from contamination, predation, and social hazard. We proposed elsewhere a neurocognitive model of ritualized behavior in human development and pathology, as based on the activation of a specific hazard-precaution system specialized in the detection of and response to potential threats. We show how certain features of collective rituals—by conveying information about potential danger and presenting appropriate reaction as a sequence of rigidly described precautionary measures—probably activate this neurocognitive system. This makes some collective ritual sequences highly attention-demanding and intuitively compelling and contributes to their transmission from place to place or generation to generation. The recurrence of ritualized behavior as a central feature of collective ceremonies may be explained as a consequence of this bias in selective transmission.
Bergstrom B, Moehlmann B, and Boyer P (2006) Extending the testimony problem: Evaluating the truth, scope and source of cultural information. Child Development, 77(3): 531-538. Click here for draft pdf. Back to HomePage	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 guarding against the dangers of false or misleading information. Currently, the development of these appraisal processes is not clearly understood. Recent work, reviewed here, has begun to address three important dimensions of the problem: how children and adults evaluate truth in communication, how they gauge the inferential potential of information, and how they encode and evaluate its source.
Boyer, P, & Ramble, C, (2001). Cognitive Templates for Religious Concepts: Cross-cultural Evidence for Recall of Counter-Intuitive Representations Cognitive Science 25:535-564. Click here for pdf.	Abstract: 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 studies we used narratives to test the hypothesis that domain-level violations are recalled better than other conceptual associations. These studies used material constructed in the same way as religious concepts, but not used in religions familiar to the subjects. Experiments 1 and2 confirmed a distinctiveness effect for such material. Experiment 3 shows that recall also depends on the possibility to generate inferences from violations of domain expectations. Replications in Gabon (Exp. 4) and Nepal (Exp. 5) showed that recall for domain-level violations is better than for violations of basic-level expectations. Overall sensitivity to violations is similar in different cultures and produces similar recall effects, despite differences in commitment to religious belief, in the range of local religious concepts or in their mode of transmission. However, differences between Gabon and Nepal results suggest that familiarity with some types of domain-level violations may paradoxically make other types more salient. These results suggest that recall effects may account for the recurrent features found in religious concepts from different cultures.
Boyer, P (2000). Natural Epistemology or Evolved Metaphysics? Developmental Evidence for Early-Developed, Intuitive, Category-Specific, Incomplete, and Stubborn Metaphysical Presumptions, Philosophical Psychology, 13:277 -297. Link to pdf version.	Abstract: Cognitive developmental evidence is sometimes conscripted to sup-port "naturalized epistemology" arguments to the effect that a general epistemic stance leads children to build theory-like accounts of underlying properties of kinds. A review of the evidence sug-gests that what prompts conceptual acquisition is not a general epis-temic stance but a se-ries of category-specific intuitive principles that constitute an evolved 'natural metaphysics'. This consists in a system of categories and category-specific inferential processes founded on definite biases in prototype formation. Evidence for this system provides a better understanding of the limited 'plasticity' of ontological commitments as well as a computationally plausible account of their initial state, avoiding ambiguities about innateness. This may provide a starting point for a 'naturalized epistemology' that takes into account evolved properties of human conceptual structures.
Boyer, Pascal, (2000). Functional Origins of Religious Concepts: Conceptual and Strategic Selection in Evolved Minds [Malinowski Lecture 1999] Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute,6 :195 -214. Link to pdf archive.	Abstract: Culturally successful religious concepts are the outcome of selective processes that make some concepts more likely than others to be easily ac-quired, stored and transmitted. Among the constructs of human imagination, some connect to intuitive ontological principles in such a way that they constitute a small catalogue of culturally successful supernatural concepts. Experimental and anthropological evidence confirm the salience and trans-mission potential of this catalogue. Among these supernatural concepts, cog-nitive capacities for social interaction introduce a further selection. As a re-sult, some concepts of supernatural agents are connected to morality, group-identity, ritual and emotion. These typical 'religious' supernatural agents are tacitly presumed to have access to information that is crucial to social interac-tion, an assumption that boosts their spread in human groups.
Boyer, P. (2000) Evolution of the modern mind and the origins of culture: religious concepts as a limiting case, in Carruthers, P. & Chamberlain, A. (Eds.), Evolution and the Human Mind: Modularity, Language and Meta-Cognition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp93 -112.	Abstract: The human cultural explosion is often explained in terms of "liberating events", of a newly acquired flexibility in mental representations. This chapter considers a domain where such flexibility should be maximal, that of religious representations, and shows that actual cultural transmission in in fact constrained by evolved properties of ontological categories and principles. More generally, this suggests that the "cultural mind" typical of recent human evolution is not so much an "unconstrained" mind as a mind equipped with a host of complex specialised capacities that make certain kinds of mental representations likely to succeed in cultural transmission.
Boyer, P. & Walker, S.J. (2000). Intuitive Ontology and Cultural Input in the Acquisition of Religious Concepts, in Rosengren, K., Johnson, C. & Harris, P. (Eds.), Imagining the Impossible: Magical, Scientific and Religious Thinking in Children, New York: Cambridge University Press, pp.130 -156.	Abstract: Do children have religious beliefs, and in what ways are they different from adult ones? Clearly, the question is of interest to anthropologists who need to understand how religious representations are acquired and therefore how cultural assumptions are transmitted from generation to generation. It is also important for developmental psychology. What children grasp of religious concepts and beliefs may illuminate how they build complex conceptual structures on the basis of limited input. Surprisingly, studies of the development of religious concepts are still few and far between. They are not really satisfactory either, for two reasons. One is that such studies often apply to developmental phenomena views of adult religious concepts that have no sound cognit`ive basis. Another reason is that such studies generally ignore a wealth of anthropological material concerning the diversity as well as recurrent features of religious concepts. This is why the first part of this chapter deals with religious representations in adults, introducing a cognitive framework based on anthropological evidence. We then argue that this framework makes it possible to evaluate the relevance of recent developmental evidence to an understanding of religious concepts, and to specify in what ways children's religious concepts differ from the adult version.