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Psychology

D-Index
47
Citations
17204
World Ranking
6030
National Ranking
3269

Research.com Recognitions

  • 2011 - Fellow of John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation

Overview

Pascal Boyer is affiliated with Washington University in St. Louis in the United States. Their research spans several fields including Social Sciences, Neuroscience, and Psychology, with a particular focus on subfields such as Sociology and Political Science, Cognitive Neuroscience, Safety Research, Social Psychology, and Experimental and Cognitive Psychology.

The main topics Pascal Boyer's work addresses include:

  • Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation
  • Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment
  • Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies
  • Cultural Differences and Values
  • Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior
  • Language and Cultural Evolution
  • Social and Intergroup Psychology

Pascal Boyer's recent publications demonstrate a focus on cognition, rituals, and institutional truth-making. Selected papers include:

  • "Why Divination?", 2020, published in Current Anthropology
  • "Ingredients of 'rituals' and their cognitive underpinnings", 2020, published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences
  • "Ownership psychology as a cognitive adaptation: A minimalist model", 2022, published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences
  • "Truth-making institutions: From divination, ordeals and oaths to judicial torture and rules of evidence", 2020, published in Evolution and Human Behavior
  • "Deriving Features of Religions in the Wild", 2021, published in Human Nature

Frequent co-authors collaborating with Pascal Boyer include:

  • Hugo Mercier
  • Eric Chantland
  • Pierre Liénard
  • Julien Musolino
  • Lou Safra

Pascal Boyer has published extensively in journals, with notable repeated contributions to:

  • Evolution and Human Behavior
  • Behavioral and Brain Sciences
  • Religion Brain & Behavior
  • Human Nature
  • Current Anthropology

In addition to journal articles, Pascal Boyer has authored books published by Cambridge University Press and Open Book Publishers. These include:

  • The Cognitive Science of Belief, 2022, published by Cambridge University Press
  • Human Cultures through the Scientific Lens, 2021, published by Open Book Publishers

Pascal Boyer was awarded the Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 2011.

Best Publications

  • Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought

    Pascal Boyer

  • The Naturalness of Religious Ideas: A Cognitive Theory of Religion

    Pascal Boyer

  • Why ritualized behavior? Precaution systems and action parsing in developmental, pathological and cultural rituals.

    Pascal Boyer;Pierre Liénard

  • Religious thought and behaviour as by-products of brain function.

    Pascal Boyer

  • Tradition as Truth and Communication: A Cognitive Description of Traditional Discourse

    Pascal Boyer

  • Cognitive templates for religious concepts: Cross-cultural evidence for recall of counter-intuitive representations.

    Pascal Boyer;Charles Ramble

  • Religion explained : the human instincts that fashion gods, spirits and ancestors

    Pascal Boyer

  • Evolutionary economics of mental time travel

    Pascal Boyer

  • Conceptualizing Control in Social Cognition: How Executive Functioning Modulates the Expression of Automatic Stereotyping.

    B. Keith Payne

  • Precaution systems and ritualized behavior

    Pascal Boyer;Pierre Liénard

  • What Makes Anthropomorphism Natural: Intuitive Ontology and Cultural Representations

    Pascal Boyer

  • Whence Collective Rituals? A Cultural Selection Model of Ritualized Behavior

    Pierre Liénard;Pascal Boyer

  • Cognitive tracks of cultural inheritance: how evolved intuitive ontology governs cultural transmission

    Pascal Boyer

  • The Detection of Contingency and Animacy from Simple Animations in the Human Brain

    Sarah Jayne Blakemore;P. Boyer;M. Pachot-Clouard;A. Meltzoff

  • Et l'homme créa les dieux: - comment expliquer la religion

    Pascal Boyer;Tiina Arppe

  • FUNCTIONAL ORIGINS OF RELIGIOUS CONCEPTS: ONTOLOGICAL AND STRATEGIC SELECTION IN EVOLVED MINDS*

    Pascal Boyer

  • Evolutionary Perspectives on Religion

    Pascal Boyer;Brian Bergstrom

  • Explaining moral religions

    Nicolas Baumard;Pascal Boyer

  • Domain Specificity and Intuitive Ontology.

    Pascal Boyer;H. Clark Barrett

  • Cognitive Aspects of Religious Symbolism

    Pascal Boyer

  • Minds Make Societies: How Cognition Explains the World Humans Create

    Pascal Boyer

  • The Naturalness of Religious Ideas: A Cognitive Theory of Religion.

    Don Gardner;Pascal Boyer

Frequent Co-Authors

Michael Bang Petersen
Michael Bang Petersen Aarhus University
Jean Decety
Jean Decety University of Chicago
Jutta Heckhausen
Jutta Heckhausen University of California, Irvine
Andrew N. Meltzoff
Andrew N. Meltzoff University of Washington
Marjorie Taylor
Marjorie Taylor University of Oregon
R. Shayna Rosenbaum
R. Shayna Rosenbaum York University
Sarah-Jayne Blakemore
Sarah-Jayne Blakemore University of Cambridge
Michael J. Chandler
Michael J. Chandler University of British Columbia
Erik Z. Woody
Erik Z. Woody University of Waterloo
Paul L. Harris
Paul L. Harris Harvard University

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