Minds Make Societies

By Pascal Boyer,

Book cover of Minds Make Societies: How Cognition Explains the World Humans Create

Book description

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…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Minds Make Societies as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Minds Make Societies continues a series of works on the social structures of thought. 

An earlier book examined religion. This one shows how societies think about themselves, and the heuristics they use. From an anthropological perspective it, again, provides a frame for understanding complex societies that is both in some ways obvious yet also very rare.

From Geoff's list on how societies think.

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