Anna Jon-And, Fredrik Jansson, Jérôme Michaud, Axel Ekström, Johan Lind
{"title":"Sequence representation and cultural systems are necessary for cumulative culture.","authors":"Anna Jon-And, Fredrik Jansson, Jérôme Michaud, Axel Ekström, Johan Lind","doi":"10.1017/S0140525X26106529","DOIUrl":"10.1017/S0140525X26106529","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Chater and Christiansen explain cultural complexity as emerging through local social tinkering. We argue that this account can be complemented by two minimal principles: sequence representation as a cognitive prerequisite for cumulative culture and cultural-systems dynamics as a formal account of how interacting traits stabilize, constrain, and reshape later tinkering. Together, they explain how simple mechanisms generate complex cultural organization.</p>","PeriodicalId":8698,"journal":{"name":"Behavioral and Brain Sciences","volume":"49 ","pages":"e402"},"PeriodicalIF":8.2,"publicationDate":"2026-09-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148988033","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Roles or rules?","authors":"Samuel G B Johnson","doi":"10.1017/S0140525X26105731","DOIUrl":"10.1017/S0140525X26105731","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Jara-Ettinger and Dunham's institutional stance conceives of social behavior in terms of roles; economists instead define institutions in terms of rules. I argue that rules, rather than roles, are logically (and likely cognitively) primary because (i) rules are underdetermined by roles, (ii) many rules are more abstract than roles, and (iii) rules only work if they rarely need to be enforced.</p>","PeriodicalId":8698,"journal":{"name":"Behavioral and Brain Sciences","volume":"49 ","pages":"e381"},"PeriodicalIF":8.2,"publicationDate":"2026-09-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148988043","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Institutions as adaptive regulators of social stability.","authors":"Abby Jo Adams","doi":"10.1017/S0140525X26105494","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X26105494","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Jara-Ettinger and Dunham propose that human social cognition relies on an institutional stance grounded in generative, role-structured representations. I extend this account by suggesting that institutional reasoning functions as a constraint-regulating cognitive system, balancing stability and flexibility under changing social demands and helping explain how role-based coordination remains robust without producing rigidity, overload, or breakdown.</p>","PeriodicalId":8698,"journal":{"name":"Behavioral and Brain Sciences","volume":"49 ","pages":"e368"},"PeriodicalIF":8.2,"publicationDate":"2026-09-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148987914","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"What are institutions made of?","authors":"Julian Jara-Ettinger, Yarrow Dunham","doi":"10.1017/S0140525X2610692X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X2610692X","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>How do people understand a social world built from hundreds of interconnected social structures? The commentaries on our proposed answer, the institutional stance, clustered around three questions: (1) What is the conceptual structure within the stance and where does it come from? (2) How does the stance integrate with mentalizing, and to what extent are they separate systems? (3) What changes when we think of people not as observers of social life but as participants in it? The commentaries also highlight new aspects of social cognition we had not considered but which may fall within the stance's scope. Here we address these questions and challenges, clarify key aspects of our account, and offer friendly amendments and future empirical directions aimed at addressing important challenges raised in the comments.</p>","PeriodicalId":8698,"journal":{"name":"Behavioral and Brain Sciences","volume":"49 ","pages":"e393"},"PeriodicalIF":8.2,"publicationDate":"2026-09-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148987971","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Social tinkering is real, but is it enough?","authors":"Manvir Singh, Louise Toutée","doi":"10.1017/S0140525X2610658X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X2610658X","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>We are sympathetic to the target article's emphasis on directed innovation and coordinated problem-solving as the microfoundations of emergent social order. Nevertheless, the authors' framing of social tinkering as a middle ground between extremes of deliberate design and selection on random variation risks caricaturing reasonable scientific positions and obscuring the question of which processes (one-shot innovation, incremental tinkering, and additional processes like cultural group selection) contribute most to complex cooperative institutions.</p>","PeriodicalId":8698,"journal":{"name":"Behavioral and Brain Sciences","volume":"49 ","pages":"e410"},"PeriodicalIF":8.2,"publicationDate":"2026-09-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148988060","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"How does institutional reasoning develop?","authors":"Marjorie Rhodes, Duygu Yilmaz","doi":"10.1017/S0140525X26105640","DOIUrl":"10.1017/S0140525X26105640","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The authors propose that humans are endowed with the \"institutional stance\" - a capacity to interpret social behavior through roles within institutional structures. We consider that this capacity might reflect a developmental achievement rather than a starting point. Early social reasoning may reflect domain-general tendencies to represent kinds with normative properties, with generative institutional reasoning emerging later with differentiated representations of individuals.</p>","PeriodicalId":8698,"journal":{"name":"Behavioral and Brain Sciences","volume":"49 ","pages":"e385"},"PeriodicalIF":8.2,"publicationDate":"2026-09-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148987908","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Where IS the ought? The Institutional Stance lacks normative force.","authors":"Lucas Payne Butler, Marco F H Schmidt","doi":"10.1017/S0140525X26105597","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X26105597","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The Institutional Stance (IS) offers a promising account of how humans navigate institutional structures, but it suffers from a problem inherent in purely third-person frameworks: a detached observer can predict behavior aligned with institutional expectations, but cannot feel the binding grip of normative force. We propose reconceptualizing the IS as an important aspect of social cognition rooted in shared intentionality.</p>","PeriodicalId":8698,"journal":{"name":"Behavioral and Brain Sciences","volume":"49 ","pages":"e373"},"PeriodicalIF":8.2,"publicationDate":"2026-09-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148987974","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Michał Białek, Katarzyna Pypno-Blajda, Kacper Szymański
{"title":"When markets meet minds: The institutional stance resolves decades of theoretical ambiguity in behavioural economics.","authors":"Michał Białek, Katarzyna Pypno-Blajda, Kacper Szymański","doi":"10.1017/S0140525X26105548","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X26105548","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Behavioural economics knows that market norms displace social norms, but has never explained why the substitution is cognitively abrupt or why some findings built on it replicate while others do not. Jara-Ettinger and Dunham's institutional stance supplies both answers: stance adoption makes the two logics genuinely incompatible, and embeddedness in real role relationships determines whether an effect survives replication.</p>","PeriodicalId":8698,"journal":{"name":"Behavioral and Brain Sciences","volume":"49 ","pages":"e372"},"PeriodicalIF":8.2,"publicationDate":"2026-09-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148987991","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Tinkering toward what? On the absence of fitness goals in cultural evolution.","authors":"Nicolas Baumard","doi":"10.1017/S0140525X26106608","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X26106608","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Chater and Christiansen rightly argue that cultural change is intelligent, directed, and coordinative rather than blind. But the metaphor of tinkering they borrow from Jacob is intelligible only because biology specifies what tinkering is for: inclusive fitness. In their account, the analogous criterion is missing. Restoring fitness, channeled through local ecologies, would supply what the framework currently lacks.</p>","PeriodicalId":8698,"journal":{"name":"Behavioral and Brain Sciences","volume":"49 ","pages":"e396"},"PeriodicalIF":8.2,"publicationDate":"2026-09-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148987993","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Tinkering beyond the present: The importance of future thinking for cultural complexity.","authors":"Gillian L Vale, Christine Coughlin","doi":"10.1017/S0140525X26106591","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X26106591","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Chater and Christensen propose a short-sighted tinkerer's local adjustments are repurposed to support the spontaneous organization of complex cultures. We commend their conceptualization of innovation by recombination but challenge the tinkerer's myopic focus, which contrasts with humans' rich capacity for prospective thought. We suggest humans' farsightedness facilitates their remarkable capacity for complex and diverse cultures.</p>","PeriodicalId":8698,"journal":{"name":"Behavioral and Brain Sciences","volume":"49 ","pages":"e418"},"PeriodicalIF":8.2,"publicationDate":"2026-09-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148988037","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}