Pascal Boyer

The aim of this project is to provide a new, synthetic model of the cognitive processes involved in the acquisition and diffusion of religious representations, by focusing on three mains questions, namely:

1. Concepts. Which religious representations are acquired and transformed by human minds, in such a way that they become culturally widespread? A few types of religious concepts (e.g., ancestors, spirits, gods) display recurrent features in otherwise very different cultures. What explains these similarities?

2. Communication and belief. What processes lead to some representations being held as true and to what extent religious beliefs differ, in terms of reasoning, from other kinds of belief?

3. Commitment and participation. What processes make some religious beliefs the basis for alliances and groups? The aim is to explain this process on the basis of a more general understanding of the evolutionary and cognitive processes of group-formation – how human beings manage the benefits and costs of building and maintaining alliances.

In addressing these three questions, one should pay special attention to the diversity of religious traditions, and in particular, to the crucial distinction between the religions of small-communities, what we often call “traditional” religions, and the doctrinal or “organized” religions that are familiar to most of us, a contrast that might be better described as that between “wild” and “domesticated” traditions (Boyer, 2019). This distinction is important to understand the processes that explain the acquisition of concepts, the formation of beliefs and the constitution of religion-based groups.

The general strategy in this project is to combine two different domains of scholarship: on the one hand, our best knowledge of different religious systems, based on the historical and anthropological records – which in recent years has been considerably enriched by large-scale comparative data-bases and diffusion models; on the other, findings and models from the neuro-sciences, experimental psychology and evolutionary biology, which provide detailed accounts of the individual psychological processes that underpin the cultural phenomena described in this project.