His most influential work has been in the fields of cognitive anthropology, linguistic pragmatics, psychology of reasoning, and philosophy of the social sciences.

He was born in France and raised an atheist but his parents, both non-religious Ashkenazi Jews, imparted to the young Sperber a "respect for my Rabbinic ancestors and for religious thinkers of any persuasion more generally".

In 1965 he joined the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) as a researcher, initially in the Laboratoire d'Études Africaines (African studies laboratory).

[10] Nevertheless, Sperber has persistently defended the legacy of Lévi-Strauss' work as opening the door for naturalistic social science, and as an important precursor to cognitive anthropology.

Sperber's approach is broadly Darwinist—it explains the macro-distribution of a trait in a population in terms of the cumulative effect micro-processes acting over time—but departs from memetics because he does not see representations as replicators except for in a few special circumstances (such as chain letters).

[15] The cognitive and epidemiological approach to cultural evolution has been influential, and has been described by the philosopher Kim Sterelny as "the Paris School" contrasted to the "California School" of Rob Boyd and Peter Richerson[16][17][18] His latest work, published with cognitive scientist Hugo Mercier, has developed their argumentative theory of reasoning into a more general interactionist approach to reason.