#223 Pascal Boyer: Minds Make Societies, Religion, And Conspiracy Theories
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Dr. Pascal Boyer is the Henry Luce Professor of Individual and Collective Memory in the Departments of Psychology and Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis. He was a Guggenheim Fellow and a visiting professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of Lyon, France. He’s also the author of books like Religion Explained; Memory, Mind and Culture; and Minds Make Societies.
In this episode, we focus mostly on the main topics of Minds Make Societies. We start off by talking about how we need to know how minds work if we want to understand how humans create societies. To set things off, we also refer to core knowledge, and to the flaws in the psychological literature on biases and heuristics. We then get into how human politics evolved, and the common threads that we find from small-scale hunter-gatherer and horticultural tribes to complex large-scale state societies. We also go over the evolution of gender roles, and their relationship with politics (patriarchy). In the last part of the conversation, we discuss the evolutionary psychology of religion, and some of the methodological problems with its approach. And we wrap it up with a question from my patron, Yzar Wehbe, about conspiratorial thinking.
Time Links:
00:58 The premise of Minds Make Societies
05:16 Our minds construct our reality
16:08 About core knowledge
23:46 How biased and irrational are people, really?
36:54 Human politics, from hunter-gatherer tribes to modern industrialized states
58:34 Scaling up societies
1:10:48 Gender roles and patriarchy
1:32:53 The evolutionary psychology/anthropology of religion
1:39:39 The trouble with social science research on belief and unbelief (religiosity and atheism)
1:49:57 Studying the evolution of religion
1:53:53 Question from my producer, Yzar Wehbe, about conspiratorial thinking
2:00:57 Follow Dr. Boyer’s work!
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Follow Dr. Boyer’s work:
Faculty Page: http://bit.ly/2XZHWbn
Website: http://bit.ly/2M1Knba
ResearchGate profile: http://bit.ly/2Ydywgw
Books on Amazon: https://amzn.to/2JUZHDt
Minds Make Societies: How Cognition Explains the World Humans Create: https://amzn.to/2OlreUr
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A HUGE THANK YOU TO MY PATRONS: KARIN LIETZCKE, ANN BLANCHETTE, SCIMED, PER HELGE HAAKSTD LARSEN, LAU GUERREIRO, RUI BELEZA, ANTÓNIO CUNHA, CHANTEL GELINAS, JERRY MULLER, FRANCIS FORDE, HANS FREDRIK SUNDE, BRIAN RIVERA, ADRIANO ANDRADE, YEVHEN BODRENKO, SERGIU CODREANU, ADAM BJERRE, ŁUKASZ STAFINIAK, AIRES ALMEIDA, BERNARDO SEIXAS, HERBERT GINTIS, RUTGER VOS, RICARDO VLADIMIRO, BO WINEGARD, AND JOHN CONNORS!
A SPECIAL THANKS TO MY PRODUCERS, YZAR WEHBE, ROSEY, AND JIM FRANK!
I also leave you with the link to a recent montage video I did with the interviews I have released until the end of June 2018:
https://youtu.be/efdb18WdZUo
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