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 Evolutionary Psychology
Boyer P, Firat R, van Leeuwen F (2015) Safety, Threat and Stress in Intergroup Relations. A Coalitional Index model Perspectives in Psychological Science xx: xxx-xxx. Click here for draft version [pdf].	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 psychology includes evolved cognitive systems designed to garner support from other individuals, organize and maintain alliances, and measure potential support from group members. Relations between alliances are strongly influenced by threat detection mechanisms, which are sensitive to cues that express one’s own group will provide less support or that other groups are dangerous. Repeated perceptions of such threat-cues can lead to chronic stress. The model provides a parsimonious explanation for many individual-level effects of intergroup relations and group-level disparities in health and well-being. This perspective suggests new research directions aimed at understanding the psychological processes involved in intergroup relations.
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 & Petersen, MB (2012) Studying institutions in the context of natural selection: limits or opportunities? [forthcoming] Journal of Institutional Economics. Click here for proofs [pdf].	In this comment, we respond to comments raised by Eastwood (2010) in response to our article on the role of evolutionary psychology in understanding institutions (Boyer and Petersen, 2011). We discuss how evolutionary psychological models account for cultural variation and change in institutions, how sociological institutionalism and evolutionary models can inform each other, how evolutionary psychological models illuminate the role of power in institutional design and the possibility of a ‘general theory’ of institutionsons.
Boyer P, Lienard P, Xu J (2011) Cultural Differences in Investing in Others and in the Future: Why Measuring Trust Is Not Enough, PLoS One, 7(7) e40750. Click here for article [pdf].	Stan dard 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 [c] their trust in institutions. Results suggest that these measures capture deep differences in economic attitudes that are not detected by standard measures of generalized trust .
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 & Bergstrom, B (2010) Threat-Detection in Child Development: An Evolutionary Perspective [forthcoming] Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews. Click here for draft version [pdf].	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 repeteadly during human evolution. Also consistent with evolutionary perspective, the threat-detection systems are domain-specific, comprising different kinds of cues to do with predation, intraspecific violence, contamination-contagion and status loss. Proper evolutionary models may also be relevant to outstanding issues in the domain, notably the connections between typical development and pathology.
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) 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 & Bergstrom, B (2008) Evolutionary Perspectives on Religion Annual Review of Anthropology 37:111-130. Click here for draft version [pdf].	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 experiences associated with these representations. One perspective, inspired from behavioral ecology, attempts to measure the ﬁtness effects of religious practices. Another set of models, representative of evolutionary psychology, explain religious thought and behavior as the output of cognitive systems (e.g., animacy detection, social cognition, precautionary reasoning) that are not exclusive to the religious domain. In both perspectives, the question remains open, whether religious thought and behavior constitute an adaptation or a by-product of adaptive cognitive function.
Boyer, P (2008) Evolutionary Economics of Mental Time-Travel? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 12(6):219-223. Click here for draft version [pdf].	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-discounting and impulsive, opportunistic behaviour. In this view, while simple episodic memory provides us with a store of relevant, case-based information to guide decisions, mental-time-travel nudges us towards more restrained choices, which in the long term are advantageous, especially so given the human dependence on cooperation and coordination.
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.
Boyer, P & Barrett, HC (2006) Causal Inferences: Evolutionary Domains and Neural Systems Invited contribution to an Interdisciplines.org Web-conference on Causation (Anne Reboul & Gloria Origgi, Editors).	We consider two apparently distinct questions: [1] What are the neural correlates of causal inference? And [2] How do we distinguish between different domains of causal inferences? To understand the varieties of causal thinking in human minds, we need to bring together behavioral and developmental data on the one hand and information from both neuro-psychology and neuro-imaging on the other. Once this evidence is replaced in an evolutionary framework, it becomes easier to understand the functional divisions between neural systems. We discuss these questions in the context, first, of high-level conceptual differences between living-things and artifacts, and then of low-level causal perception.
Boyer, P & Barrett, HC (2005). Evolved Intuitive Ontology: Integrating Neural, Behavioral and Developmental Aspects of Domain-Specificity in David Buss (Ed.), Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, New York: Wiley. Link to pdf file	Recent research has begun to suggest that human expertise about the natural and social environment, including what is often called 'semantic knowledge', is best construed as consisting of different domains of competence. Each of these corresponds to recurrent evolutionary problems, is organised along specific principles, is the outcome of a specific developmental pathway and is based on specific neural structures. What we call a 'human evolved intuitive ontology' comprises a catalogue of broad domains of information, different sets of principles applied to these different domains as well as different learning rules to acquire more information about those objects. Neuro-imaging and cognitive neuroscience are now adding to the picture of a federation of evolved competencies that has grown out of laboratory work with children and adults.
Blakemore, S-J, Boyer, P , Pachot-Clouard, M], Meltzoff, A et al. (2003). The detection of contingency and animacy in the human brain Cerebral Cortex 13 : 837-844. Link to pdf version	The ability to detect contingency is fundamental for understanding the world and other people around us. We used simplified stimuli to investigate brain regions involved in detection of mechanical and intentional contingencies. Using a factorial design we manipulated the 'animacy' and 'contingency' of stimulus movement, and the subject's attention to the contingencies. The perception of mechanical contingency between shapes whose movement was inanimate engaged the middle temporal gyrus and intraparietal sulcus. The detection of intentional contingency between shapes whose movement was animate activated superior parietal networks. These activations were unaffected by attention to contingency. Additional regions, the middle and inferior frontal gyrus, superior temporal sulcus and anterior cingulate, became activated by the animate-contingent stimuli when subjects specifically attended to the contingent nature of stimuli. Our results help to clarify neural networks previously associated with 'theory of mind' and agency-detection.
Blakemore, S J; Fonlupt, P; Pachot-Clouard, M; Darmon, C; Boyer, P; Meltzoff, A N et al. How the brain perceives causality: an event-related fMRI study, Neuroreport: For Rapid Communication of Neuro-science Research, 12(17), 3741-3746.	{Medline abstract} 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 another ball) and non-causal events (in which no contact is made between the balls). There was a significantly higher level of activation of V5/MT/MST bilaterally, the superior temporal sulcus bilaterally and the left intraparietal sulcus to causal relative to non-causal events. Directing attention to the causal nature of the stimuli had no significant effect on the neural processing of the causal events. These results support theories of causality suggesting that the perception of elementary mechanical causality events is automatically processed by the visual system. [Journal Article; In English; England]
Boyer, P., Bedoin, N. & Honore, S. Relative contributions from kind- and domain-concepts to inferences concerning unfamiliar exemplars. Cognitive Development 15:457 -479. Link to pdf version	Abstract: Two inferential routes allow children to produce expectations about new instances of ontological categories like 'animal' and 'artefact'. One is to generalise information from a 'look-up table' of familiar kind-concepts. The other one is to use independent expectations at the level of ontological do-mains. Our experiment pits these two sources of information against each other, using a sentence-judgement task associating proper-ties with images of familiar and unfamiliar artefacts and animals. A look-up strategy would lead children to reject them and an independent expectation strategy to accept them. In both domains we find a difference in reaction to strange properties associated with familiar vs. unfamiliar items, which shows that even young children do use independent domain-level information. We also found a U-shaped curve in propensity to use such abstract information. Also, animal categories are the object of much more definite domain-level expectations, which supports the notion that the animal domain is more causally integrated than the artefact domain.
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, 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.