Pascal Boyer

Lay it on me.

So anthropologist Pascal Boyer introduced this concept, often called Boyer's Mechanism.

It suggests that human beings map our hardest physical constraints, like our mortality or physical vulnerability, onto the categories of religion.

Like we invent an afterlife because we are afraid of dying.

Yeah, there's lots of possible interpretations.

I'm also reminded of what Pascal Boyer said about that.

So he had a paper on rituals.

The strength of his theory is that it applies to also private rituals.

the likes of which everyone experiences in their life.

[laughs] And so there's this great concept in a book called Minds Make Societies by Pascal Boyer, and he talks about how, yeah, one of the key things in good science is to avoid accidentally anthropomorphizing your subjects.

So if you anthropomorphize a dog, you'll make a whole bunch of assumptions about it which are incorrect, which leads to poor science.

And so scientists around the world in every field have to be really careful not to accidentally project their human constructs onto the subject.

And Pascal Boyer in his book makes the point that the one area of science where we do that dramatically all the time, and with exactly the same negative effect, is when studying people.

[laughs]

And we in effect anthropomorphize people, which makes us fail to understand how we actually are.