On a Folk Theory of Society: Children, Evolution, and Mental Representations of Social Groups

Representing and reasoning about the social universe is a major task for the young child, one that almost certainly involves specialized knowledge structures. Individuals in interaction are fundamental elements of sociality, and, unsurprisingly, evolution has prepared children with special-purpose mechanisms for drawing attention to and processing information about persons. Social aggregates are also fundamental elements of human sociality, yet we know much less about the child’s grasp of them and the institutions that mediate among them. One reason for this lacuna is that researchers have typically framed children’s social knowledge according to how adultlike (or not) that understanding is. This article proposes that it may be more productive to approach children’s social knowledge from the perspective of the child herself or himself. Arguably, even quite young children deploy lay theories of society that emerge from a special-purpose endogenous module for identifying and reasoning about human aggregates.