Minds Make Societies, Pascal Boyer
Minds Make Societies, Pascal Boyer
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Minds Make Societies
How Cognition Explains the World Humans Create

Author: Pascal Boyer

Narrator: Tom Parks

Unabridged: 13 hr 4 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 10/30/2018

Synopsis

A watershed book that masterfully integrates insights from evolutionary biology, genetics, psychology, economics, and more to explore the development and workings of human societies“There is no good reason why human societies should not be described and explained with the same precision and success as the rest of nature.” Thus argues evolutionary psychologist Pascal Boyer in this uniquely innovative book.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.

About Pascal Boyer

Pascal Boyer is the Henry Luce Professor of Collective and Individual Memory and professor of anthropology and psychology at Washington University in St. Louis. His books include Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Terence

In Minds Make Societies, Boyer sets out to discuss six problems in light of research primarily in evolutionary biology and psychology. [1] What is the root of conflict: “[W]e make sense of very diverse, occasionally paradoxical behaviors in terms of evolved capacities for coalition building and coali......more

Goodreads review by Kim

Academically rigorous, but accessible to the general reader. The principal argument of the book is that society is the way it is because of how human minds work. The various cognitive processes, for which experimental evidence is accumulating, explains both the common and variable features of social......more

Goodreads review by Simon

Full review available in Anthropologica 16(2), 2019, [URL not allowed] Pascal Boyer s'est imposé au monde académique et à l'attention générale par une analyse cognitive des concepts surnaturels, liant leur émergence et leur attrait à une combinaison de violation modérée et de c......more

Goodreads review by Kumar

An interesting book that sets out to systematically identify the reason why many of our social practices have come into existence today - from religious affiliations to fairness in treating others. The narrative weaves between the make up of the human mind and how that has resulted in shaping our so......more

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