Minds Make Societies Quotes

“The world over, people seem to be greatly interested in moralizing, regulating, and generally monitoring other people’s behaviors. This is of course very much the case in small-scale groups, where one lives under the tyranny of the cousins, as some anthropologists described it. But in large, modern societies, we also see that people are greatly interested in others’ mores, sexual preferences, the way they marry or what drugs they take. This certainly goes beyond self-interest and raises the question, Is it part of human nature to meddle?”
― Pascal Boyer, Minds Make Societies: How Cognition Explains the World Humans Create

“Humans never invented anything that goes as deep as scientific investigation into understanding why the world is the way it is, nor have we found any other way of seeking knowledge that gets it so consistently right. Doing science is also difficult and frustrating, and in many ways goes against the grain of our spontaneous ways of thinking.”
― Pascal Boyer, Minds Make Societies: How Cognition Explains the World Humans Create

“In evolutionary terms, these explanations of course have it back to front. We do not like sugar because it tastes good and abhor vomit because it is foul smelling. Rather, one is delicious and the other repulsive because we were designed to seek the former and avoid the latter. We evolved in environments in which sugar was rare enough that taking all you could was a good strategy, and vomit was certainly full of toxins and pathogens. Individuals who showed these preferences, a bit more than others, would extract more calories and fewer dangerous substances from their environments. On average, these individuals would have an ever so slightly better chance of having offspring than those others.”
― Pascal Boyer, Minds Make Societies: How Cognition Explains the World Humans Create

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

“As I mentioned in a previous chapter, we should avoid the symmetrical pitfalls of Hobbes’s vision (a war of all against all) and Rousseau’s (cooperation between peaceful Noble Savages) in our descriptions of ancestral conditions. More soberly, the evidence suggests intensive cooperation within groups and potential conflicts, including warfare, between them.”
― Pascal Boyer, Minds Make Societies: How Cognition Explains the World Humans Create

“The potential benefits of an efficient marriage in most cases cannot be achieved without sacrifices, as the spouses do not have identical preferences. So marriage requires honest, hard-to-fake signals of commitment. These are provided in many societies by costly conditions for marriage, for example, the obligation for brides to leave their kin groups, for grooms to provide bride wealth, to show adequate means to support a family, and the like.56 Making commitment public makes it stronger, because it makes defection more costly to one’s reputation. Victoria cannot desert Albert and Albert cannot neglect Victoria without their breaking their word and revealing themselves as unreliable individuals, therefore unfit for cooperation in the eyes of third parties.”
― Pascal Boyer, Minds Make Societies: How Cognition Explains the World Humans Create

“Marriage is a package. Why do unions associate sex, children, economic solidarity, cohabitation? In other words, why would you expect to share food with people you have sex with? Why, after producing children, would you jointly raise your children and (generally) not other people’s?”
― Pascal Boyer, Minds Make Societies: How Cognition Explains the World Humans Create

“Nettle, 2010; Nettle, Colléony, and Cockerill, 2011; Nettle et al., 2007. 49. Ellis, Figueredo, Brumbach, and Schlomer, 2009. 50. Belsky, Steinberg, and Draper, 1991; Del Giudice, 2009b; Rosenblum and Paully, 1984; Stearns, Allal, and Mace, 2008.”
― Pascal Boyer, Minds Make Societies: How Cognition Explains the World Humans Create

“unrelated individuals raised together are typically not attracted to each other. Their kinship inference systems are fooled by these exceptional conditions, and mistake the bride or groom for a sibling. That is why classical Taiwanese minor marriages, in which the bride grew up with her future groom, were less prolific and more likely to break up than standard unions.”
― Pascal Boyer, Minds Make Societies: How Cognition Explains the World Humans Create

“Information is our environment, our niche, and as we are complex animals we constantly transform that niche, sometimes in ways that make it possible to acquire even more information from our surroundings.”
― Pascal Boyer, Minds Make Societies: How Cognition Explains the World Humans Create

“How did general prosperity encompass the entire world? Here the answer is that prosperity rises, first slowly and then increasinly fast, in all places where people can engage in peaceful and voluntary exchanges. Trade and the innovations that it makes possible provide the only known escape route from poverty.”
― Pascal Boyer, Minds Make Societies: How Cognition Explains the World Humans Create

“Humans were designed by evolution to live in societies, but they may not understand how societies work.”
― Pascal Boyer, Minds Make Societies: How Cognition Explains the World Humans Create

“Deliberation is made possible by our evolved reasoning capacities, and this explains why, as historians and political scientists have along observed, free and open deliberation generally leads to choices superior to those of autocratic and technocratic systems.”
― Pascal Boyer, Minds Make Societies: How Cognition Explains the World Humans Create

“Experiments show that even three-year-olds have the intuition that rewards should be proportional to contributions, in places as different as Japanese cities and the camps of Turkana nomads in Kenya. Obviously, it does happen that people take more than their share-but that is universally considered exploitative, and people are eager to avoid or shun individuals who do that.”
― Pascal Boyer, Minds Make Societies: How Cognition Explains the World Humans Create

“We have different sets of intuitive principles for man-made objects and natural beings, because we are toolmakers and must understand the connection between the shape of objects and their functions. We have social expectations because we need social support. As we shall see, we have moral intuitions because we depend on fair exchange to prosper. In each case, having these cognitive dispositions made our ancestors more successful than others at reproduction, which is precisely why they turned out to be our ancestors.”
― Pascal Boyer, Minds Make Societies: How Cognition Explains the World Humans Create

“The proper place to start, in order to understand the various things called religion, is in the human capacity to entertain supernatural fantasy. This vast domain of cognition includes daydreaming, fiction, myth, dreams, all produced by what classical psychology would have called the faculty of imagination.”
― Pascal Boyer, Minds Make Societies: How Cognition Explains the World Humans Create

“So there was a clear economic rationale for an ancestral division of labor, where individuals of each sex contributed more of what was comparatively advantageous to them. Women of course (and sometimes do) hunt, but men are on average more productive hunters; men can (and often do) gather and process foods, but they are not any more productive than women at the task.”
― Pascal Boyer, Minds Make Societies: How Cognition Explains the World Humans Create

“Ethnic violence is not an uncontrolled outburst of rage. The fact that it takes such predictable forms means that some common processes are shaping these violent interactions, and that participants have psychological capacities and preferences that make it possible for them to engage in these acts in a coordinated manner.”
― Pascal Boyer, Minds Make Societies: How Cognition Explains the World Humans Create