Yarrow Dunham

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.

Are current members of a social group responsible for making amends for the harm caused by their predecessors? We explored U.S. children's and adults' views on whether responsibility is limited to the original perpetrators or extends to the group's present members. Across four studies (342 children [6-12 years; 50% girls, 49% boys, 1% gender unknown; 52% White, 21% Asian, 7% Hispanic, 5% Black, 9% other, 6% race unknown] and 665 adults [47% women, 52% men, 1% gender unknown; 74% White, 10% Black, 6% Asian, 5% Hispanic, 4% other, 1% race unknown]), participants evaluated vignettes where an advantaged group could compensate a disadvantaged group that they had previously harmed or that was disadvantaged for independent reasons. Younger children believed wealthy groups should always compensate poorer ones, while older children and adults judged compensation more necessary when harm was caused by the advantaged group (Experiment 1). Older children also believed compensation and apology should be offered even when the disadvantaged group had recovered economically (Experiment 2) or when the current members of the advantageous group no longer benefit from the harm (Experiment 3). Adults, while ambivalent about monetary compensation in these cases, agreed on the need for apology. Experiment 4 replicated Experiment 2 with more realistic stimuli, confirming that adults' overall high collective responsibility ascriptions were not caused by the child-friendly materials used in Experiments 1-3. Although limited by a U.S. convenience sample, these findings suggest that children, like adults, attribute collective responsibility for harms committed by a group's predecessors. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Human social life unfolds within richly structured networks of overlapping relationships, including friendships, hierarchies, and collaborations. Yet the observable interactions that reveal these networks are often sparse and noisy, making it unclear how people could infer the latent structure of their social environments from such limited evidence. We propose that humans integrate domain-general statistical learning with domain-specific models of social structures to rapidly construct causal representations that support explanation, prediction, and planning. Across three behavioral experiments, we show that participants can infer underlying social structures (Experiment 1), predict social behavior (Experiment 2), and reason about the spread of social influence (Experiment 3), based on brief, abstract videos of social interactions. These judgments were closely captured by a computational model grounded in our account and could not be explained by simpler cue-based accounts. Statistical learning and causal reasoning operate in concert to support rapid, flexible understanding of social structures.

Establishing a shared sense of right and wrong is an essential milestone for human cooperation, raising the question of whether a universal set of moral intuitions exists. However, tests of universality in the domain of human morality are hindered by the overrepresentation of participants from Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) societies and issues of validity that arise from the use of WEIRD measures (i.e., measures originating in WEIRD societies and primarily normed on WEIRD samples) to make cross‐cultural comparisons. Here we address the tension between cross‐cultural generalizability and validity by deploying a two‐stage approach to investigate the moral beliefs of 5‐ to 10‐year‐olds from four diverse societies ( N = 331). Specifically, we test a classic case study in which strong universality claims have previously been made: the “moral/conventional” distinction. In Study 1, we test for the distinction cross‐culturally using standardized measures widely used in moral cognition research and find robust evidence of the distinction in Canadian children, but a more variable pattern among Korean, Indian, and Iranian children, with Iranian children showing the weakest evidence for a distinction. In Study 2, we focus specifically on Iran and tailor experimental stimuli to reflect culture‐specific norms in that country. We find that Iranian children residing under a theocracy also exhibit the moral/conventional distinction—so long as moral and conventional codes do not intersect with religious or legal concerns. These findings support the use of a two‐stage model in which cultural comparisons are made using both shared and culturally specific measures. Research Highlights: Two studies examined whether children in four diverse societies make the distinction between violations of moral codes and social conventions. When standardized methods were used, evidence for the moral/conventional distinction was robust in Western children, variable in non‐Western children, and weakest in Iranian children. Strong evidence for the moral/conventional distinction was found in Iranian children when culturally tailored measures were used. Our findings support the use of a two‐stage model that combines the strengths of standardized and tailored measures for conducting cross‐cultural research.

Human success in navigating the social world is typically attributed to our capacity to represent other minds—a mentalistic stance . We argue that humans are endowed with a second equally powerful intuitive theory: an institutional stance . In contrast to the mentalistic stance, which helps us predict and explain unconstrained behavior via unobservable mental states, the institutional stance interprets social interactions in terms of role-based structures that constrain and regulate behavior via rule-like behavioral expectations. We argue that this stance is supported by a generative grammar that builds structured models of social collectives, enabling people to rapidly infer, track, and manipulate the social world. The institutional stance emerges early in development and its precursors can be traced across social species, but its full-fledged generative capacity is uniquely human. Once in place, the ability to reason about institutional structures takes on a causal role, allowing people to create and modify social structures, supporting new forms of institutional life. Human social cognition is best understood as an interplay between a system for representing the unconstrained behavior of individuals in terms of minds and a system for representing the constrained behavior of social collectives in terms of institutional structures composed of interlocking sets of roles.

This chapter asks the reader to go backward in time to understand how we become complex adults, the usual subjects in our social psychological investigations. What do children bring to the table and how do these initial tools interact with the rich environments and varied persons around them to ultimately create the socially savvy grown-ups they will one day become?