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 Religious Thought and Behaviour
Baumard N, Hyafil A, Morris I, Boyer P (2015) Increased Affluence Explains the Emergence of Ascetic Wisdoms and Moralizing Religions, Current Biology 25: 1-6. Click here for draft [pdf].	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 “other-worldly”, often moralizing, doctrines, including Buddhism, Jainism, Brahmanism, Daoism, Second Temple Judaism, and Stoicism, with later offshoots such as Christianity, Manichaeism and Islam. This cultural convergence, often called the “Axial Age”, presents a puzzle: Why this emergence at the same time of distinct moralizing religions with highly similar features in different civilizations? Quantitative history evidence demonstrates an exceptional uptake in energy capture (a proxy for general prosperity) just before the “Axial Age” in these three regions. Statistical modeling confirms that economic development, not political complexity or population size, accounts for the timing of the Axial Age.
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 (2013) Explaining religious concepts. Lévi- Strauss the brilliant and problematic ancestor, in D Xygalatas & L McCorkle (Eds.) Mental Culture, Classical Social Theory and the Cognitive Science of Religion, Durham, UK: Acumen, pp. 164-75. Click here for proofs [pdf].	Claude Lévi-Strauss went further than most in renewing our understanding of universal constraints on human cultures. Surprisingly, his findings and models have had very little influence on contemporary accounts of religion. This is because he was a proponent and an eminent practitioner the “science mode” in anthropology. Also, Lévi- Strauss clearly had no trust in the notion of “religion”. He did not believe that the term denotes any coherent set of phenomena. He was, I will argue, quite right about that, but this of course did limit the appeal of his models for scholars of religion, many of whom do believe that there is such a domain as “religion”. Finally, Lévi- Strauss did not relate his hypotheses on cultural phenomena to any precise cognitive models of psychological processes, for the perfectly good reason that the latter did not exist at the time he put forward the basic tenets of structural anthropology. As a result, most structural models lack the psychological precision required to account for actual religious concepts and behaviours.
Baumard N & Boyer P (2013) Explaining moral religions Trends in Cognitive Science. Click here for proofs [pdf].	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 was their emphasis on proportionality (between deeds and supernatural rewards, between sins and penance, and in the formulation of the Golden Rule, according to which one should treat others as one would like others to treat oneself). Recent models of evolved dispositions for fairness in cooperation suggest that proportionality-based morality is highly intuitive to human beings. This may explain the cultural success of moralizing movements, secular or religious, based on proportionality.
Baumard N & Boyer P (2013) Religious beliefs as reflective elaborations on intuitions: A modified dual-process model Current Directions in Psychological Science. Click here for proofs [pdf].	Religious beliefs apparently challenge our view of human cognition as 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, while other systems produce explicit, often deliberate comments on those intuitions. This perspective accounts for the fact that religious beliefs are apparently diverse but thematically similar, and that they are immune to refutation and more attractive to imaginative individuals.
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 (2008) Religion: Bound to Believe? Nature vol 455: 1038-39. Click here for draft version [pdf].	Is religion a product of our evolution? In the past ten years, the evolutionary and cognitive study of religion has begun to mature. It puts forward new hypotheses and testable predictions. It asks what in the human make-up renders religion possible and successful. Findings from cognitive psychology, neuroscience, cultural anthropology and archaeology promise to change our view of religion.
Boyer, P & Lienard, P (2008) Ritual Behavior in Obsessive and Normal Individuals. Moderating Anxiety and Reorganizing the Flow of Behavior Current Dirctions in Psychological Science 17(4): 291-4. Click here for draft version [pdf].	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 organism towards appropriate precautions. Ritualized behavior focuses attention on low-level representations of actions, probably leading to some measure of intrusion suppression. Cultural rituals too may be understood in this framework.
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, & Lienard, P (2006) Why Ritualized Behavior? Precaution Systems and Action-Parsing in Developmental, Pathological and Cultural Rituals Behavioral and Brain Sciences 29: 1-56. Click here for pdf of proofs.	Stereotypic, rigidly scripted behavior is found in cultural rituals, in children's routines, in obsessive-compulsive disorder, in normal adults around certain stages of the life-cycle. We propose an explanation in terms of an evolved Precaution System geared to the detection of and reaction to inferred threats to fitness, distinct from systems for manifest danger. The Precaution system includes a repertoire of potential hazards as well as a repertoire of species-typical precautions. Impairment in the system's feedback accounts for OCD rituals. Gradual calibration of this system occurs through childhood routines. Mimicry of this system's natural input makes cultural rituals salient and compelling.
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.	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 (2004) Why Is Religion Natural? Skeptical Inquirer Magazine, March 2004. Link to Skeptical Inquirer archive.	Is religious belief a mere leap into irrationality as many skeptics assume? Psychology suggests that there may be more to belief than the suspension of reason. Religious beliefs and practices are found in all human groups and go back to the very beginnings of human culture. What makes religion so 'natural'? Here I want to discuss one particular view of religion, popular among skeptics, that I call the 'sleep of reason' interpretation. According to this view, people have religious beliefs because they fail to reason properly. If only they grounded their reasoning in sound logic or rational order, they would not have supernatural beliefs, including superstitions and religion. I think this view is misguided, for several reasons; because it assumes a dramatic difference between religious and commonsense ordinary thinking, where there isn't one; because it suggests that belief is a matter of deliberate weighing of evidence, which is generally not the case; because it implies that religious concepts could be eliminated by mere argument, which is implausible; and most importantly because it obscures the real reasons why religion is so extraordinarily widespread in human cultures.
Boyer, P (2003) Religious Thought and Behaviour As By-products of Brain Function. Trends in Cognitive Sciences Vol. 7No. 3March2003 ,119 -124. Link to pdf archive.	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 activates distinct neural resources or families of networks. What makes notions of supernatural agency intuitively plausible? This article reviews evidence suggesting that it is the joint, coordinated activation of these diverse systems, a supposition that opens up the prospect of a cognitive neuroscience of religious beliefs.
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, 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.