Pascal Boyer, the Henry Luce Professor of Collective and Individual Memory
It is in the nature of human beings that they create societies. Philosophers have known and said that much for millennia. These days, scientists can paint a detailed picture of how evolution by natural selection made us social animals, providing us with those capacities and preferences that makes social beings, those many bits of mental software that we use to maintain social life.
But to be designed for social life does not guarantee that you understand social life.
Indeed, the evidence from psychology and anthropology suggests that our social adaptations, while being indispensable to building societies, may also hamper our understanding of those same societies. Especially as we live in complex, mass-societies, very different from the small-scale communities in which our minds evolved over hundreds of thousands of years.
Read the full piece in the Yale University Press blog.