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Relational core cognition is for understanding the meaning of social life, not just enduring interpersonal relationships

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 May 2026

Lotte Thomsen Open the ORCID record for Lotte Thomsen [Opens in a new window]
Lotte Thomsen*
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway lotte.thomsen@psykologi.uio.no https://www.sv.uio.no/psi/personer/vit/lottetho/ Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark
*
*Corresponding author.
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Abstract

Understanding innate core cognition for social relations as a deep, generative social grammar that helps solve the learnability problem of discovering who relates to whom in what ways “amounts to asking how human social life is understandable, and hence possible” (Thomsen & Carey, 2013, p.17). Expanding the focus beyond enduring interpersonal relationships allows us to understand how social and societal meaning (e.g., in ideology) reflect fundamental forms of relational coordination ultimately grounded in cross-species affordances.

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Open Peer Commentary
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 49 , 2026 , e52
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© The Author(s), 2026. Published by Cambridge University Press

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