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Minds Make Societies: How Cognition Explains the World Humans Create

Book by Pascal Boyer · 3 quotes · Evolution, Mind, Cognition

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

“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.”

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Book:Minds Make Societies: How Cognition Explains the World Humans Create
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“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.”

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Book:Minds Make Societies: How Cognition Explains the World Humans Create
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“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.”

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