31 found
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  1.  76
    Cognitive templates for religious concepts: cross‐cultural evidence for recall of counter‐intuitive representations.Pascal Boyer & Charles Ramble - 2001 - Cognitive Science 25 (4):535-564.
    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 (...)
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  2. Why ritualized behavior? Precaution systems and action parsing in developmental, pathological and cultural rituals.Pascal Boyer & Pierre Liénard - 2006 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 29 (6):595-613.
    Ritualized behavior, intuitively recognizable by its stereotypy, rigidity, repetition, and apparent lack of rational motivation, is found in a variety of life conditions, customs, and everyday practices: in cultural rituals, whether religious or non-religious; in many children's complicated routines; in the pathology of obsessive-compulsive disorders (OCD); in normal adults around certain stages of the life-cycle, birthing in particular. Combining evidence from evolutionary anthropology, neuropsychology and neuroimaging, we propose an explanation of ritualized behavior in terms of an evolved Precaution System geared (...)
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  3.  16
    Cognitive science and neuroscience of religious thought and behavior.Pascal Boyer - 2003 - Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7 (3):119-24.
  4. Explaining moral religions.Nicolas Baumard & Pascal Boyer - 2013 - Trends in Cognitive Sciences 17 (6):272-280.
  5.  42
    Ownership psychology as a cognitive adaptation: A minimalist model.Pascal Boyer - 2023 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 46:e323.
    Ownership is universal and ubiquitous in human societies, yet the psychology underpinning ownership intuitions is generally not described in a coherent and computationally tractable manner. Ownership intuitions are commonly assumed to derive from culturally transmitted social norms, or from a mentally represented implicit theory. While the social norms account is entirelyad hoc, the mental theory requires prior assumptions about possession and ownership that must be explained. Here I propose such an explanation, arguing that the intuitions result from the interaction of (...)
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  6.  57
    Folk-economic beliefs: An evolutionary cognitive model.Pascal Boyer & Michael Bang Petersen - 2018 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 41:e158.
    The domain of “folk-economics” consists in explicit beliefs about the economy held by laypeople, untrained in economics, about such topics as, for example, the causes of the wealth of nations, the benefits or drawbacks of markets and international trade, the effects of regulation, the origins of inequality, the connection between work and wages, the economic consequences of immigration, or the possible causes of unemployment. These beliefs are crucial in forming people's political beliefs and in shaping their reception of different policies. (...)
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  7. Evolutionary Perspectives on Religion.Pascal Boyer - unknown
    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 (...)
     
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  8.  26
    Deriving Features of Religions in the Wild.Pascal Boyer - 2021 - Human Nature 32 (3):557-581.
    Religions “in the wild” are the varied set of religious activities that occurred before the emergence of organized religions with doctrines, or that persist at the margins of those organized traditions. These religious activities mostly focus on misfortune; on how to remedy specific cases of illness, accidents, failures; and on how to prevent them. I present a general model to account for the cross-cultural recurrence of these particular themes. The model is based on features of human psychology—namely, epistemic vigilance, the (...)
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  9.  98
    Natural epistemology or evolved metaphysics? Developmental evidence for early-developed, intuitive, category-specific, incomplete, and stubborn metaphysical presumptions.Pascal Boyer - 2000 - Philosophical Psychology 13 (3):277 – 297.
    Cognitive developmental evidence is sometimes conscripted to support ''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 suggests that what prompts conceptual acquisition is not a general epistemic stance but a series 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 (...)
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  10.  22
    Individual Choose-to-Transmit Decisions Reveal Little Preference for Transmitting Negative or High-Arousal Content.Florian van Leeuwen, Nora Parren, Helena Miton & Pascal Boyer - 2018 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 18 (1-2):124-153.
    Research on social transmission suggests that people preferentially transmit information about threats and social interactions. Such biases might be driven by the arousal that is experienced as part of the emotional response triggered by information about threats or social relationships. The current studies tested whether preferences for transmitting threat-relevant information are consistent with a functional motive to recruit social support. USA residents were recruited for six online studies. Studies 1a and 1B showed that participants more often chose to transmit positive, (...)
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  11.  87
    Varieties of self-systems worth having.Pascal Boyer, Philip Robbins & Anthony I. Jack - 2005 - Consciousness and Cognition 14 (4):647-660.
  12.  68
    Intuitive expectations and the detection of mental disorder: A cognitive background to folk-psychiatries.Pascal Boyer - 2011 - Philosophical Psychology 24 (1):95-118.
    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 and anthropological ethno-psychiatry . I 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 (...)
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  13. Precaution systems and ritualized behavior.Pascal Boyer & Pierre Liénard - 2006 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 29 (6):635-641.
    In reply to commentary on our target article, we supply further evidence and hypotheses in the description of ritualized behaviors in humans. Reactions to indirect fitness threats probably activate specialized precaution systems rather than a unified form of danger-avoidance or causal reasoning. Impairment of precaution systems may be present in pathologies other than obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), autism in particular. Ritualized behavior is attention-grabbing enough to be culturally transmitted whether or not it is associated with group identity, cohesion, or with any (...)
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  14.  54
    Extending the range of adaptive misbelief: Memory “distortions” as functional features.Pascal Boyer, Ryan T. McKay & Daniel C. Dennett - 2009 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32 (6):513-514.
    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.
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  15.  22
    Intuitive credit attribution and the priority rule.Mia Karabegovic, Tristin Blatt, Pascal Boyer & Hugo Mercier - forthcoming - Philosophical Psychology.
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  16.  65
    If “tracking” is category-specific a “common structure” may be redundant.Pascal Boyer - 1998 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 21 (1):67-68.
    Identifying objects as members of ontological domains activates category-specific processes. There is evidence that these processes include particular ways of “tracking” substances and could do all the “tracking” necessary for concept acquisition. There may be no functional need or evolutionary scenario for a general tracking capacity of the kind described by Millikan.
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  17.  26
    Cognitive predispositions and cultural transmission.Pascal Boyer - 2009 - In Pascal Boyer & James V. Wertsch (eds.), Memory in Mind and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 288 - 319.
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  18.  28
    Projecting WEIRD features on ancient religions.Pascal Boyer & Nicolas Baumard - 2016 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 39.
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  19. Cognitive limits to conceptual relativity: the limitingcase of religious categories.Pascal Boyer - 1996 - In John J. Gumperz & Stephen C. Levinson (eds.), Rethinking Linguistic Relativity. Cambridge University Press. pp. 203--231.
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  20.  11
    Ownership psychology, its antecedents and consequences.Pascal Boyer - 2023 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 46:e355.
    Commentators discussed the coherence and validity of a minimalist approach to ownership intuitions, in ways that make it possible to clarify the model, re-evaluate its cognitive underpinnings, and sketch some of its implications. This response summarizes the model; addresses issues concerning the need for a special technical lexicon when describing cognitive semantics; the psychology involved in contexts of competitive acquisition and their consequences for possession and use of rival resources; the role of cooperative expectations in creating mutually beneficial allocation of (...)
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  21. Refereeing in 1997.Patrick Baert, Brian Baigrie, Stanley Barrett, Pascal Boyer, Michael Chiarello, R. H. Coase, Lorraine Code, Wes Cooper, Timothy M. Costelloe & Robert D’Amico - 2000 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 30 (3):480.
  22.  17
    Beyond folk-sociology: Extending Pietraszewski's model to large-group dynamics.Pascal Boyer - 2022 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 45.
    Folk-sociology is a set of intuitive assumptions that organize our spontaneous theories about society, including the notion that social groups are agent-like. Pietraszewski's model may explain this folk-sociological assumption in an elegant way. However, large-scale group dynamics include features that seem to escape agent-like descriptions. Therefore, one may want to find out whether the “event-grammar” proposed here can account for these features.
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  23.  40
    Causal thinking and its anthropological misrepresentation.Pascal Boyer - 1992 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 22 (2):187-213.
    The study of causal inferences is an essential part of the study of other cultures. It is therefore crucial to describe the cognitive mechanisms whereby subjects are led to find specific causal explanations plausible and "natural." In the anthropological literature, specific causal connections are described as the result produced by applying a general "conception of causation" or some general "theories" to specific events; the essay aims to show that these answers are either trivial or false. The "naturalness" of explanations must (...)
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  24.  44
    Cultural transmission with an evolved intuitive ontology: Domain-specific cognitive tracks of inheritance.Pascal Boyer - 1998 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 21 (4):570-571.
    Atran's account of cultural transmission can be further refined by considering constraints from early-developed, domain-specific intuitive ontological understanding. These suggest specific predictions about the cultural survival of “memes,” depending on the way they activate intuitive understanding. There is no general dynamic of cultural inheritance; only complex predictions for domain-specific competencies that cut across cultural domains.
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  25. Human cognition and cultural evolution.Pascal Boyer - 1999 - In Henrietta L. Moore (ed.), Anthropological theory today. Malden, MA: Polity Press. pp. 206--33.
     
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  26.  12
    (1 other version)What are Memories for? Functions of Recall in Cognition and Culture.Pascal Boyer - 2009 - In Pascal Boyer & James V. Wertsch (eds.), Memory in Mind and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 3.
  27.  26
    Missing links: The psychology and epidemiology of shamanistic beliefs.Pascal Boyer - 2018 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 41.
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  28.  17
    Morality, Valuation and Coalitional Psychology.Pascal Boyer - 2020 - American Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience 11 (4):287-289.
    We are all aware that many people can easily combine general moral understandings that make unprovoked violence inexcusable, with tolerance or even support for that same behavior when it is carried...
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  29.  85
    Prosocial aspects of afterlife beliefs: Maybe another by-product.Pascal Boyer - 2006 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 29 (5):466-466.
    Bering argues that belief in posthumous intentional agency may confer added fitness via the inhibition of opportunistic behavior. This is true only if these agents are interested parties in our moral choices, a feature which does not result from Bering's imaginative constraint hypothesis and extends to supernatural agents other than dead people's souls. A by-product model might handle this better.
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  30.  38
    The stuff 'traditions' are made of: On the implicit ontology of an ethnographic category.Pascal Boyer - 1987 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 17 (1):49-65.
  31.  27
    What is seen and what is not seen in the economy: An effect of our evolved psychology.Pascal Boyer & Michael Bang Petersen - 2018 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 41:e191.
    Specific features of our evolved cognitive architecture explain why some aspects of the economy are “seen” and others are “not seen.” Drawing from the commentaries of economists, psychologists, and other social scientists on our original proposal, we propose a more precise model of the acquisition and spread of folk-beliefs about the economy. In particular, we try to provide a clearer delimitation of the field of folk-economic beliefs (sect. R2) and to dispel possible misunderstandings of the role of variation in evolutionary (...)
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