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 ele-ments 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 research-ers 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 ap-proach children’s social knowledge from the perspective of the child herself or him-self. Arguably, even quite young children deploy lay theories of society that emerge from a special-purpose endogenous module for identifying and reasoning about hu-man aggregates. A critical and early encountered task for the young child is to adduce who and what is out there in th