External links
- Boyer's website
- “Why Is Religion Natural?”, Skeptical Inquirer, Volume 28.2, March/April 2004
- Book review: Religion Explained, by Pascal Boyer
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Pascal Boyer | |
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| Nationality | French-American |
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| Title | Henry Luce Professor of Individual and Collective Memory |
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| Institutions | Washington University in St. Louis |
| Notable works | Religion Explained |
| Website | pascalboyer |
Pascal Robert Boyer is an American cognitive anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist of French origin,mostly known for his work in the cognitive science of religion. He taught at the University of Cambridge 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 and anthropology. [1] He was a Guggenheim Fellow and a visiting professor at the University of California,Santa Barbara and the University of Lyon,France. [2] He studied philosophy and anthropology at University of Paris and Cambridge,with Jack Goody,working on memory constraints on the transmission of oral literature. [3] Boyer is a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Pascal Boyer,an anthropologist,studies how human biases and cognitive faculties have resulted in or encouraged cultural phenomena. [4] He advocates the idea that human evolution resulted in specialized capacities that guide our social relations,culture,and predilections toward religious beliefs. 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. [4]
Boyer has conducted long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Cameroon,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. 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. [3] 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.
Of Boyer's books, Religion Explained:The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought is the best known. Boyer introduced cognitive anthropology,which provided a new understanding of religion. [5] 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 [6] belief in supernatural agents is natural and part of human cognition. [7] 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".
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. [8]
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? [9]
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.
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A meme is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme. A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices, that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures. In popular language, a meme may refer to an Internet meme, typically an image, that is remixed, copied, and circulated in a shared cultural experience online.
Anthropology of religion is the study of religion in relation to other social institutions, and the comparison of religious beliefs and practices across cultures. The anthropology of religion, as a field, overlaps with but is distinct from the field of Religious Studies. The history of anthropology of religion is a history of striving to understand how other people view and navigate the world. This history involves deciding what religion is, what it does, and how it functions. Today, one of the main concerns of anthropologists of religion is defining religion, which is a theoretical undertaking in and of itself. Scholars such as Edward Tylor, Emile Durkheim, E.E. Evans Pritchard, Mary Douglas, Victor Turner, Clifford Geertz, and Talal Asad have all grappled with defining and characterizing religion anthropologically.
Psychology of religion consists of the application of psychological methods and interpretive frameworks to the diverse contents of religious traditions as well as to both religious and irreligious individuals. The various methods and frameworks can be summarized according to the classic distinction between the natural-scientific and human-scientific approaches. The first cluster amounts to objective, quantitative, and preferably experimental procedures for testing hypotheses about causal connections among the objects of one's study. In contrast, the human-scientific approach accesses the human world of experience using qualitative, phenomenological, and interpretive methods. This approach aims to discern meaningful, rather than causal, connections among the phenomena one seeks to understand.
Ritualization refers to the process by which a sequence of non-communicating actions or an event is invested with cultural, social or religious significance. This definition emphasizes the transformation of everyday actions into rituals that carry deeper meaning within a cultural or religious context. Rituals are symbolic, repetitive, and often prescribed activities that hold religious or cultural significance for a certain group of people. They serve various purposes: promoting social solidarity by expressing shared values, facilitating the transmission of cultural knowledge and regulating emotions.
Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought is a 2001 book by cognitive anthropologist Pascal Boyer, in which the author discusses the evolutionary psychology of religion and evolutionary origin of religions.
Cognitive archaeology is a theoretical perspective in archaeology that focuses on the ancient mind. It is divided into two main groups: evolutionary cognitive archaeology (ECA), which seeks to understand human cognitive evolution from the material record, and ideational cognitive archaeology (ICA), which focuses on the symbolic structures discernable in or inferable from past material culture.
Dual inheritance theory (DIT), also known as gene–culture coevolution or biocultural evolution, was developed in the 1960s through early 1980s to explain how human behavior is a product of two different and interacting evolutionary processes: genetic evolution and cultural evolution. Genes and culture continually interact in a feedback loop: changes in genes can lead to changes in culture which can then influence genetic selection, and vice versa. One of the theory's central claims is that culture evolves partly through a Darwinian selection process, which dual inheritance theorists often describe by analogy to genetic evolution.
Dan Sperber is a French social and cognitive scientist and philosopher. His most influential work has been in the fields of cognitive anthropology, linguistic pragmatics, psychology of reasoning, and philosophy of the social sciences. He has developed: an approach to cultural evolution known as the epidemiology of representations or cultural attraction theory as part of a naturalistic reconceptualization of the social; relevance theory; the argumentative theory of reasoning. Sperber formerly Directeur de Recherche at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique is Professor in the Departments of Cognitive Science and of Philosophy at the Central European University in Budapest.
Cognitive anthropology is an approach within cultural anthropology and biological anthropology in which scholars seek to explain patterns of shared knowledge, cultural innovation, and transmission over time and space using the methods and theories of the cognitive sciences often through close collaboration with historians, ethnographers, archaeologists, linguists, musicologists, and other specialists engaged in the description and interpretation of cultural forms. Cognitive anthropology is concerned with what people from different groups know and how that implicit knowledge, in the sense of what they think subconsciously, changes the way people perceive and relate to the world around them.
Cognitive science of religion is the study of religious thought, theory, and behavior from the perspective of the cognitive and evolutionary sciences. Scholars in this field seek to explain how human minds acquire, generate, and transmit religious thoughts, practices, and schemas by means of ordinary cognitive capacities.
Harvey Whitehouse is chair of social anthropology and professorial fellow of Magdalen College at the University of Oxford.
The evolutionary psychology of religion is the study of religious belief using evolutionary psychology principles. It is one approach to the psychology of religion. As with all other organs and organ functions, the brain's functional structure is argued to have a genetic basis, and is therefore subject to the effects of natural selection and evolution. Evolutionary psychologists seek to understand cognitive processes, religion in this case, by understanding the survival and reproductive functions they might serve.
The evolutionary origin of religion and religious behavior is a field of study related to evolutionary psychology, the origin of language and mythology, and cross-cultural comparison of the anthropology of religion. Some subjects of interest include Neolithic religion, evidence for spirituality or cultic behavior in the Upper Paleolithic, and similarities in great ape behavior.
Epidemiology of representations, or cultural epidemiology, is a theory for explaining cultural phenomena by examining how mental representations get distributed within a population. The theory uses medical epidemiology as its chief analogy, because "...macro-phenomena such as endemic and epidemic diseases are unpacked in terms of patterns of micro-phenomena of individual pathology and inter-individual transmission". Representations transfer via so-called "cognitive causal chains" ; these representations constitute a cultural phenomenon by achieving stability of public production and mental representation within the existing ecology and psychology of a populace, the latter including properties of the human mind. Cultural epidemiologists have emphasized the significance of evolved properties, such as the existence of naïve theories, domain-specific abilities and principles of relevance.
Cognitive anthropologist Pascal Boyer argued that minimally counterintuitive concepts (MCI) i.e., concepts that violate a few ontological expectations of a category such as the category of an agent, are more memorable than intuitive and maximally counterintuitive (MXCI) concepts. A number of experimental psychology studies have found support for Boyer's hypothesis. Upal labelled this as the minimal counterintuitiveness effect or the MCI-effect.
The context-based model of the counterintuitiveness effect is a cognitive model of The Minimal Counterintuitiveness Effect i.e., the finding by many cognitive scientists of religion that minimally counterintuitive concepts are more memorable for people than intuitive and maximally counterintuitive concepts
Cognitive ecology of religion is an integrative approach to studying how religious beliefs covary with social and natural dynamics of the environment. This is done by incorporating a cognitive ecological perspective to cross-cultural god concepts. Religious beliefs are thought to be a byproduct of domain-specific cognitive modules that give rise to religious cognition. The cognitive biases leading to religious belief are constraints on perceptions of the environment, which is part and parcel of a cognitive ecological approach. This means that they not only shape religious beliefs, but they are determinants of how successfully cultural beliefs are transmitted.
Evolutionary psychology has traditionally focused on individual-level behaviors, determined by species-typical psychological adaptations. Considerable work, though, has been done on how these adaptations shape and, ultimately govern, culture. Tooby and Cosmides (1989) argued that the mind consists of many domain-specific psychological adaptations, some of which may constrain what cultural material is learned or taught. As opposed to a domain-general cultural acquisition program, where an individual passively receives culturally-transmitted material from the group, Tooby and Cosmides (1989), among others, argue that: "the psyche evolved to generate adaptive rather than repetitive behavior, and hence critically analyzes the behavior of those surrounding it in highly structured and patterned ways, to be used as a rich source of information out of which to construct a 'private culture' or individually tailored adaptive system; in consequence, this system may or may not mirror the behavior of others in any given respect.".
Cognitive ecology is the study of cognitive phenomena within social and natural contexts. It is an integrative perspective drawing from aspects of ecological psychology, cognitive science, evolutionary ecology and anthropology. Notions of domain-specific modules in the brain and the cognitive biases they create are central to understanding the enacted nature of cognition within a cognitive ecological framework. This means that cognitive mechanisms not only shape the characteristics of thought, but they dictate the success of culturally transmitted ideas. Because culturally transmitted concepts can often inform ecological decision-making behaviors, group-level trends in cognition are hypothesized to address ecologically relevant challenges.
Cognitive science of new religious movements is the study of new religious movements from the perspective of cognitive science. The field employs methods and theories from a variety of disciplines, including cognitive science of religion, sociology of religion, scientific study of religion, anthropology, and artificial life. Scholars in the field seek to explain the origin and evolution of new religious movements in terms of ordinary universal cognitive processes.
