Buy new:
$34.90
FREE delivery Thursday, May 16 on orders shipped by Amazon over $35
Ships from: Amazon
Sold by: violet33
$34.90
Get Fast, Free Shipping with Amazon Prime FREE Returns
FREE delivery Thursday, May 16 on orders shipped by Amazon over $35
Only 1 left in stock - order soon.
$$34.90 () Includes selected options. Includes initial monthly payment and selected options. Details
Price
Subtotal
$$34.90
Subtotal
Initial payment breakdown
Shipping cost, delivery date, and order total (including tax) shown at checkout.
Ships from
Amazon
Ships from
Amazon
Sold by
violet33
Sold by
violet33
Returns
30-day easy returns
30-day easy returns
This item can be returned in its original condition for a full refund or replacement within 30 days of receipt.
Read full return policy
Returns
30-day easy returns
This item can be returned in its original condition for a full refund or replacement within 30 days of receipt.
Read full return policy
Payment
Secure transaction
Your transaction is secure
We work hard to protect your security and privacy. Our payment security system encrypts your information during transmission. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Learn more
Payment
Secure transaction
We work hard to protect your security and privacy. Our payment security system encrypts your information during transmission. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Learn more
$11.18
Get Fast, Free Shipping with Amazon Prime FREE Returns
Book in very good condition. Pages are crisp and clean with no markings. Ships direct from Amazon! Book in very good condition. Pages are crisp and clean with no markings. Ships direct from Amazon! See less
FREE delivery Friday, May 17 on orders shipped by Amazon over $35. Order within 8 hrs 16 mins
Only 1 left in stock - order soon.
$$34.90 () Includes selected options. Includes initial monthly payment and selected options. Details
Price
Subtotal
$$34.90
Subtotal
Initial payment breakdown
Shipping cost, delivery date, and order total (including tax) shown at checkout.
Access codes and supplements are not guaranteed with used items.
Amazon book clubs early access
Loading your book clubs
There was a problem loading your book clubs. Please try again.
Not in a club? Learn more
Amazon book clubs early access

Join or create book clubs

Choose books together

Track your books
Bring your club to Amazon Book Clubs, start a new book club and invite your friends to join, or find a club that’s right for you for free.
Explore Amazon Book Clubs
Kindle app logo image

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.

Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.

Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

QR code to download the Kindle App

Follow the author

Pascal Boyer
+ Follow
More books from this author
Something went wrong. Please try your request again later.

Minds Make Societies: How Cognition Explains the World Humans Create Hardcover – May 8, 2018

by Pascal Boyer (Author)
4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 113 ratings
See all formats and editions
{"desktop_buybox_group_1":[{"displayPrice":"$34.90","priceAmount":34.90,"currencySymbol":"$","integerValue":"34","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"90","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"JXwDI4ms3BGvFBO%2FzedwMmRwQlvk5MgEvLzeD8GHGtk4EGmJq%2FADra6lSNUd6iBieSYnmyWzbdbbT2eTWD0GqvNeWcSi%2FUIzN6zckLHEcGDW9gwog49Mys3vKzy8RJefc177h3mMme5ZhWdw7BgiNPLeG3uzfrr4p7X8g0nF%2Fx8ORAcdfaInjWHVhPEC1tPT","locale":"en-US","buyingOptionType":"NEW","aapiBuyingOptionIndex":0}, {"displayPrice":"$11.18","priceAmount":11.18,"currencySymbol":"$","integerValue":"11","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"18","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"JXwDI4ms3BGvFBO%2FzedwMmRwQlvk5MgEtA7nGFP6m9Rf%2BICdw%2Bpd1sBJDpBeqNBD57M%2BpqSbNNEjAIlTiDqPJ6M2QkzTCCdhC3emIcgTstc%2BjLnvkC4wNjG%2FzbRjoJNqAAVYmI1nrlC8RjvgbGRJ07lOiizqBlYevFmYXgx4vZnSSz67rId929MwWrokPju8","locale":"en-US","buyingOptionType":"USED","aapiBuyingOptionIndex":1}]}

Purchase options and add-ons

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.
Read more Read less
Previous page
  1. Print length
    376 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Yale University Press
  4. Publication date
    May 8, 2018
  5. Dimensions
    9.4 x 6.1 x 1.3 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    0300223455
  7. ISBN-13
    978-0300223453
  8. See all details
Next page
Amazon First Reads | Editors' picks at exclusive prices

Editorial Reviews

Review

“It is highly recommended . . . to researchers firmly settled within one of the many single disciplines in question. Not only will they encounter a wealth of information from the humanities, the social sciences and the natural sciences, but the book will also serve as an invitation to look beyond the horizons of their own fields.”—Eveline Seghers, Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture

"Elegant, dense, ambitious. . . . Anthropologists interested in challenging their view of their discipline and its relations to biology and psychology should give it a careful read."—Simon Lavoie, Anthropologica

“The most important work on a science of human culture in years.”—Leda Cosmides, University of California, Santa Barbara

“Pascal Boyer has written a wide-ranging, clear, and convincing book. It is an essential reading for anyone who wants to better understand the workings of our social world.”—Hugo Mercier, co-author of The Enigma of Reason

“Pascal Boyer’s elegant and insightful essays on human nature and human society show the power of combining anthropology, evolutionary theory, and cognitive psychology. I particularly like his balance and even-handedness in evaluating various contending social theories.”—Herbert Gintis, author of Individuality and Entanglement: The Moral and Material Bases of Social Life

“Read Pascal Boyer’s cool and captivating new book Minds Make Societies. It will change forever your understanding of society and culture.”—Dan Sperber, co-author of The Enigma of Reason

“Minds Make Societies is must-reading for those who are interested in what a new generation of scientists is discovering.”—John Tooby, Co-Director, Center for Evolutionary Psychology, University of California, Santa Barbara

About the Author

Pascal Boyer is the Henry Luce Professor of Collective and Individual Memory and professor of anthropology and psychology at Washington University in St. Louis.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Yale University Press; First Edition (May 8, 2018)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 376 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0300223455
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0300223453
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.5 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 9.4 x 6.1 x 1.3 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 113 ratings

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.
Pascal Boyer

Pascal Boyer

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.
Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more

Customer reviews

4.4 out of 5 stars
4.4 out of 5
113 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Richard Smith
5.0 out of 5 stars The triumph of SCIENCE, in the social sciences
Reviewed in the United States on August 7, 2018
Verified Purchase
This book is revolutionary in several ways. Firstly, it describes what Boyer calls a “folk sociology,” which is universal, but most disturbingly defines what passes for social theory today in academia, eg “social conditioning.” Secondly, he shows how recent advances in biology and cognitive science are starting to turn the pseudo science of sociology and psych into a real hard science. Here he alludes to the book “Human Sin or Social Sin,” by Paul Dachslager. But also Sapolsky’s book “Behave.”

What Boyer is doing is placing “Human Sin or Human Sin” on a broader anthropological and psychological foundation. While Sapolsky puts Human Sin etc onto a neurological foundation. Boyer’s volume is the newest addition to the recent flood of books on group selection inspired by Dachslager’s Human Sin or Social Sin. This book will help define the future of the social sciences and contribute to making the study of culture a true hard science.
9 people found this helpful
Helpful
 Report
E. N. Anderson
4.0 out of 5 stars Cognition, evolution, and mistakes
Reviewed in the United States on August 13, 2018
Verified Purchase
This book is a good, up-to-date review of recent findings and arguments in cognitive psychology as applied to the study of human evolution and the comparative study of societies. Boyer is an anthropologist, and thus draws on the full range of human societies, past and present, not just modern industrial ones--this is a huge advantage of the book. Most of the actual findings will be familiar to those up on the literature, though Boyer is notably good at ferreting out highly important items that are not so widely known, such as Mark van Vugt's findings on leadership and charisma, Michael Alvard and others' on the incredible level of cooperation in Lamalera whale hunting, and the three worst features of naïve sociology: thinking of groups as if they were individuals, thinking political power is a literal force, and thinking social facts are literally things. Think of a typical headline of the form "Pozolia crushes freedom of speech." Pozolia is a country (imaginary), not an individual; it can't crush anything; freedom of speech can be repressed, but not literally crushed. Boyer follows George Marcus in showing how we think in metaphors and are often misled by them.

Really distinctive about this book is Boyer's deliberate effort to avoid the "nature vs. nurture" opposition. He shows how circumstances of human evolution could have led us to think the way we do, mistakes and all, but carefully avoids saying we have "genes" to think badly or that we merely "learn" them. We now know that the early claims of "genes" for "religion," "economic competition," and so on were utter nonsense. Genes condition brains and learning in very general ways. Development, from early nutrition to schoolbook learning, does the rest. We certainly have a very complex cognitive architecture for socializing, but exactly what form it takes depends on how we're raised. And not on "culture," either; Boyer points out that "culture" is too often a sloppy shorthand for a lot of more interesting and contingent learning infiuences.
To my mind, the best chapter in the book is the one on economics (Chapter 5), which every economist should be forced to sit down and read slowly. The least persuasive is the only religion (#3). Boyer restricts analysis largely to formal world religions, rather dismissively regarding traditional belief systems of small-scale societies as too disorganized and unformalized to count. This is a mistake. The reason those "little traditions" seem so thin and informal is poor information. We know this because every time a tribal or small-scale society's belief system and cosmology is studied by many observers who specialize in religion and know about it, that society turns out to have a very impressive cosmological, philosophical, ethical, and theological system indeed. Cases in point are the Lakota, Hopi, Navaho, Huichol, Tairona, Dogon, Central Desert Australian Aborigines, Northwest Coast of North America groups (special attention to Nuuchahnulth, Haida, "Kwakiutl," and Shuswap), Aztec, and early Celtic. Nor did it take anthropologists to discover this: Bernardino de Sahagun's work with Aztec aristocrats in the 16th century and the early records of Irish belief (including the anonymous Acallan na senorach) prove it too. The problem is inadequate recording. Think if all you knew of Christianity was a record by a Martian of a year in a small Southern US town. We remain unenlightened about how so many brilliant, poetic, high-flown achievements of the human spirit are out there, lost to poor documentation. We also remain unsure why people invest so much in believing things that cannot be proved and that usually don't work out.
Better, but still a bit thin, is the chapter on group conflict (#1) . One would have expected more on genocide and other extreme situations.

One trivial error is Boyer's use of "Rousseau's noble savage" as a straw man. This error always annoys me. Rousseau never used the phrase and did not think savages were noble. His "savage" was the chimpanzee, which, like many modern biologists, he saw as a good model for ancestral humans.
All this does show that there is some overhastiness and oversimplification in Boyer's view of the world--to be sure, no one can be expected to get all humanity into 359 pages, but given Boyer's excellence at doing the job for economics and folk sociology, one would have hoped for more on religion (or whatever) and group conflict.
That said, this is a reasonable review of recent findings on cognition and evolution, and the comments on economics, justice, fairness, cooperation, and society in general are worth anyone's time.
33 people found this helpful
Helpful
 Report
dbcopper
5.0 out of 5 stars My cognition says that I did not buy or read this book
Reviewed in the United States on April 25, 2021
Verified Purchase
Seriously, I cannot remember buying or ever seeing this book in hard, soft or Kindle cover. Hmmmm, does that tell you something about my cognition? Scary thought ... but hey, it's a thought ... better than none!
Helpful
 Report
James B. Moog
5.0 out of 5 stars Must read!!
Reviewed in the United States on July 18, 2019
Verified Purchase
I have read this book several times and given many copies as gifts. I believe this book should be taught in every school. It ties together so many important discoveries about the mind and provides the most convincing explanations for human behavior that I have ever read.
2 people found this helpful
Helpful
 Report
dlr
3.0 out of 5 stars sort of annoying
Reviewed in the United States on April 25, 2021
If you've ever read any other books on evolutionary psychology, he will cover a lot of stuff you've already heard, but, there was some good new stuff.
However, I have to fault him. Despite his commitment to evolutionary explanations he uncritically accepts studies that fail to control for parental traits in studies of how environment influences children eg, ‘fatherless homes’ have a terrible impact on girls— 'studies show' girls without fathers in their lives are far more likely to be promiscuous/unwed mother/teenage births/dropped out of school/on welfare, etc. He never even considers if there might be a genetic component-- that mothers with traits that lead to not having a permanent male companion might pass on some of that genetic tendency to their daughters-- instead he assumes, or at least, uncritically accepts, studies that ascribe 100% of the causation to the environment in which the girls were raised-- either their own fatherlessness, or their living in areas where fatherlessness is common. Study after study has shown that behavioral traits between parents and children are highly correlated, regardless of whether or not the child is raised by the parent--adoption studies, twin studies, etc. Any study that ignores the factor of heritability between parents and children is useless--or at least, massively misleading, since by completely ignoring heritability, it massively overweights the influence of the environment. A mother that displays the syndrome of [promiscuous/unwed mother/ teenage birth/dropped out of high school/no husband/on welfare] is going to pass on genetically heritable traits to her children that tend to result in [promiscuous/unwed mother/ teenage birth/drops out of school/no husband/on welfare] daughters.

Another annoying feature is his tendency to take concepts that have been around for decades, and that already have well known names (eg, mental modules) and rename them (intuitive inference systems, learning systems, specialized mental systems, many other variations). This is practically criminal. It's bad enough that he doesn't just use the well known, punchy name, the new descriptors he chooses are long, mushy and unspecific, and even worse than that, he keeps experimenting around with new variations to describe them. If you are going to rename something, at least come up with something short and punchy (and if possible descriptive), and then use it consistently.

Another annoying shortcoming is his failure to include any ‘Recommendations for Further Reading’ ; making no efforts to steer readers towards the many great and accessible books on this subject. And, his reference notes are heavy with references to technical academic articles. I repeatedly had my curiosity sparked by something he said, clicked on the link to the reference, and confronted a long list of author names and dates. I then had to tediously search on each author name, scroll through, find the title associated with it, alas, all too often, a specialized scientific article behind a paywall, think, no thanks, go back to the note, pick the next name, …. I was reading the ebook version so it was especially annoying— not a single link to make it easy to see if any of a list of references might be interesting, no hint if any of them are fun, cool books rather than scholarly slogs.
7 people found this helpful
Helpful
 Report
MTOLincoln
5.0 out of 5 stars As Advertized
Reviewed in the United States on August 18, 2021
Verified Purchase
Well-packaged, in like new condition.
Helpful
 Report
Matt
4.0 out of 5 stars Unifying cognitive science from anthropology to game theory and beyond
Reviewed in the United States on April 17, 2019
Verified Purchase
This is a clear call for a "properly scientific," integrated social science based on evolution and agnostic to interdisciplinary boundaries.
3 people found this helpful
Helpful
 Report
Martin Palecek
5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent book
Reviewed in the United States on January 21, 2020
Verified Purchase
Another excellent book written by Pascal Boyer. Something you must read if you are interested in cognitive science and cultural evolution.
Helpful
 Report

Top reviews from other countries

Translate all reviews to English
Lindsey Galloway
5.0 out of 5 stars A must-read
Reviewed in Canada on July 24, 2022
Verified Purchase
A must-read survey of the most current, science-based perspectives on human behavior, threading together diverse findings and insights from several fields.
Report
tommaso
5.0 out of 5 stars Mi aspettavo di più
Reviewed in Italy on January 7, 2023
Verified Purchase
Ho trovato più bello quale lo sull’originale naturale delle idee
Report
Ferran Gaya
3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting but not Pascal’s best book
Reviewed in Spain on September 22, 2022
Verified Purchase
Pascal Boyer wrote an outstanding book: ‘Religion Explained’. This is not a bad book but it wants to cover very different areas for which the author is not so brilliant. The chapter about sex does not say anything about the sexual revolution that began in the sixties and its dubious effects that has on the western world at present.
Nevertheless the book presents a lot of ideas from the evolutive psychology from other authors and is interesting but not up to tje quality of his best work ‘Religion Explained’.
Report
Régis Maag
5.0 out of 5 stars Boyer est une Lumière
Reviewed in France on October 2, 2021
Verified Purchase
J'avais été impressionné il y a 20 ans par Et homme créa les dieux. Je trouve dans cet ouvrage une maturité renforcée et une dimension plus large que la religion dans son approche anthropologique avec des références explicites à la philosophie et aux sciences pour une vision synthétique de la base cognitive qui sert de sous-structure à la psychologie de Sapiens. À mon avis l'œuvre et son auteur méritent une reconnaissance plus marquée, Boyer aura une postérité scientifique et peut-être même sociale, j'oserais dire civilisationnelle si ce qu'il dévoile venait à être compris du grand public.
6 people found this helpful
 Report
DR. PAULO FINURAS
5.0 out of 5 stars Great book, great read.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 26, 2020
Verified Purchase
One of the best books I have ever read in the field of evolutionary psychology. Boyer writes in a very clear and illuminating way and uncovers many ideas that are notably counter intuitive. I think that in particular sociologists should "read" this book because those who do not understand evolutionary psychology and specific the concept of "intuitive inference systems" are unlikely to understand anything about sociology and sociological behaviour. After all, "Mind, make societies" as Pascal Boyer elegantly put it . I strongly recommend this book.
Report