• Professor, Anthropology
• Professor, Philosophy - Neuroscience - Psychology
• Professor, Psychology

Pascal Boyer

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• Ph.D. in anthropology at University of Paris-Nanterre

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Darwin's God The New York Times Magazine March 13, 2007 -- A New York Times Magazine cover story examines controversial theories about the existence of God and what some call the scientific assault on religion that has been garnering attention recently. But lost in the hullabaloo over the neo-atheists is a quieter and potentially more illuminating debate. It is taking place not between science and religion but within science itself, specifically among the scientists studying the evolution of religion. One of the scientists mentioned is WUSTL anthropology professor Pascal Boyer.

Do You Believe in Magic? The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine and 1 others Jan. 23, 2007 -- Psychologists and anthropologists have typically turned to faith healers, tribal cultures or New Age spiritualists to study the underpinnings of belief in superstition or magical powers. But new research demonstrates that habits of so-called magical thinking -- wishing harm on an enemy -- are far more common than people acknowledge. These habits have little to do with religious faith, but magical thinking underlies a vast, often unseen universe of small rituals that accompany people through every waking hour of a day. WUSTL psychology and anthropology professor Pascal Boyer comments.

Why we want to believe in God Seattle Times Nov. 28, 2005 -- Religion used to be ascribed to a wish to escape mortality by invoking an afterlife or to feel less alone in the world. Now, some anthropologists and psychologists suspect that religious belief is what Pascal Boyer of WUSTL calls in a 2003 paper "a predictable byproduct of ordinary cognitive function."

Boyer offers the following description of his research.

In my work I combine 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 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 I have 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. I also use 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. My 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.

Graduate Courses:

Topics in Cognitive Development, Cognition and Culture, Autobiographical Memory

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.(details)

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

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

Past research was mainly focused on the general features of religion. A general explanatory framework for religious concepts, norms and emotions was presented in "Religion Explained." This account is based on experimental results in cognition, cross-cultural comparisons and an evaluation of evolutionary pressure on social relations.