​Pascal Boyer

​Pascal Boyer

Professor of Sociocultural Anthropology and Psychology​
Henry Luce Professor of Collective and Individual Memory
PhD, Universite de Paris-Nanterre
research interests:
Cognitive Processes
Cultural Transmission
Cognitive Development
Evolutionary Psychology
Cross-Cultural Psychology
Religion
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contact info:

  • Email: pboyer@wustl.edu
  • Phone: 314-935-4739
  • Office: ​Psychology Building 412D

mailing address:

  • Washington University
    CB 1114
    One Brookings Drive
    St. Louis, MO 63130-4899

​In Professor Boyer's work, he combines experimental (laboratory) studies with field research to answer the following question: What cognitive processes are engaged in the acquisition, use and transmission of cultural knowledge?

One way to answer this question is to study cognitive development, the period during which initially similar brains receive information that will make them conversant with a particular set of cultural norms and concepts. In the past Boyer has used such developmental studies, combined with fieldwork, to describe and perhaps explain some aspects of the transmission of religious concepts. More generally, the aim of all this is to show how human brains, by virtue of their evolutionary history, share certain conceptual dispositions which in turn make certain kinds of cultural concepts particularly easy to learn and transmit, and therefore very frequent in otherwise diverse human cultures. He also uses these psychological and anthropological techniques to describe the interaction between "collective memory," how people in a group remember their past, and "individual memory," in particular autobiographical memory. His most recent work bears on the early development of concepts of agency and personhood (what makes persons and animals different from inert objects) and on early mathematical concepts, as well as on the specifically human neural structures that support such competencies.

Selected Publications

1994 The Naturalness of Religious Ideas. A Cognitive Theory of Religion, Berkeley-Los Angeles: University of California Press.

2001 Cultural Inheritance Tracks and Cognitive Predispositions: The Example of Religious Concepts, in H. Whitehouse (Ed.), The Debated Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and Ethnography, Oxford: Berg, pp. 57-89.

2001 Religion Explained. The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought, London: Random House, New York: Basic Books.

2001 (with Bedoin, N. & Honoré, S.) Relative contributions from kind- and domain-concepts to inferences concerning unfamiliar exemplars, Cognitive Development 15: 345- 362.

2003 Religious Thought and Behaviour As By-products of Brain Function. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7(3):119-124.

Minds Make Societies: How Cognition Explains the World Humans Create

Integrating recent insights from evolutionary biology, genetics, psychology, economics, and other fields, Boyer offers precise models of why humans engage in social behaviors such as forming families, tribes, and nations, or creating gender roles. In fascinating, thought-provoking passages, he explores questions such as, Why is there conflict between groups? Why do people believe low-value information such as rumors? Why are there religions? What is social justice? What explains morality? Boyer provides a new picture of cultural transmission that draws on the pragmatics of human communication, the constructive nature of memory in human brains, and human motivation for group formation and cooperation.

The Fracture of an Illusion; Science And The Dissolution Of Religion

Pascal Boyer argues that religion is largely an illusion. The anthropologist traces religion's cognitive and evolutionary aspects. By "religion" he means a kind of existential and cognitive "package" that includes views about supernatural agency (gods), notions of morality, particular rituals and sometimes particular experiences, as well as membership in a particular community of believers. The package, however, does not really exist as such. Notions of supernatural agents, of morality, of ethnic identity, or ritual requirements and other experience, all appear in human minds independently. This implies that there is no such thing as a conflict between science and religion. Boyer takes the reader onto a journey through science and the dissolution of religion.