The target article claims that people rely on representations of institutional structures and roles embedded within them to understand others’ behavior. The authors suggest that these representations pave the way for the making of all kinds of social institutions, from book clubs to companies. However, this emphasis on the understanding of roles is missing a key facet of modern human institutions, without which we cannot understand their origins – the articulation of formal rules.

The creation of powerful, recursive, and ever-expanding (see Klotz, Reference Klotz2021) human institutions (e.g., governments, universities, recreational bowling leagues) cannot be explained by merely scaling up our understanding of social roles. Institutions (from the Latin instituere “to set up”) are products of deliberate efforts to structure society with rules. Rules are articulated, legitimized, codified, and enforced directives that regulate permissible behavior. Rules are, in a sense, a technology, deliberately set up to facilitate norm conformity.

Norms are well-established as essential for large-scale human cooperation (Henrich & Muthukrishna, Reference Henrich and Muthukrishna2021), are appreciated by children from a young age (Weston & Turiel, Reference Weston and Turiel1980), and have a proto-form in animals that does not require the mentalistic stance (Andrews, Reference Andrews2009; Reference Andrews2012). Institutional rules are widely known, legitimized and enforceable by some authority (e.g., the police, the crown, “the people”), written down, and as a result, are perfectly transmittable across people and generations. Rules are a technology fashioned from the raw materials of norms.

Yet, rules and norms are ultimately different in kind. Norms are often underspecified, and their transmission is “lossy” (Heyes, Reference Heyes2018), changing as they are passed across time, contexts, and cultures. In contrast, rules are formalized and come with prespecified punishments (Wylie & Gantman, Reference Wylie and Gantman2023), and usually require deliberate effort to change. People conform to the norms only of relevant reference groups (Paluck & Prentice, Reference Prentice and Paluck2020; Sherif & Sherif, Reference Sherif and Sherif1953), but expect that the rules apply equally to everyone in their jurisdiction (Hannikainen et al., Reference Hannikainen, Tobia, de Almeida, Donelson, Dranseika, Kneer, Strohmaier, Bystranowski, Dolinina, Janik, Keo, Lauraitytė, Liefgreen, Próchnicki, Rosas and Struchiner2021; Wylie & Gantman, Reference Wylie and Gantman2023; Wylie et al., Reference Wylie, Milless, Sciarappo and Gantman2026). Rules can alter norms (e.g., Supreme Court ruling in favor of gay marriage; Tankard & Paluck, Reference Tankard and Paluck2017), and rules and norms can suggest people behave in opposite directions (e.g., jaywalking; Wylie & Gantman, Reference Wylie and Gantman2023).

Rules, then, are a very successful human innovation and are constitutive of modern institutions. This technology has been used at least as early as the earliest human writing, which details the coordination of sharing resources and repayment of debts (Graeber, Reference Graeber2011; Reference Graeber2015). Children create their own rules during play (Castle, Reference Castle1998), and can distinguish between the spirit and the letter of the law by around age four (Bregant, Wellbery, & Shaw, Reference Bregant, Wellbery and Shaw2019). By five, they can even find loopholes in the space between their meanings (Bridgers et al., Reference Bridgers, Parece, Iwasaki, Broski, Schulz and Ullman2025). Not until around seven years old, however, do children recognize that some actions are available to individuals only because of their status (i.e., role) within a particular institution (Noyes, Dunham, & Keil, Reference Noyes, Dunham and Keil2023). The capacity and proclivity to engage with rules are consistent across time and emerge early in the lifespan.

The benefits of rules-tech are substantial in streamlining institutional administration. Rules facilitate predictable interactions among large groups of strangers (Hadfield & Weingast, Reference Hadfield and Weingast2012), even when they cannot communicate with each other (Hannikainen et al., Reference Hannikainen, Tobia, de Almeida, Struchiner, Kneer, Bystranowski, Dranseika, Strohmaier, Bensinger, Dolinina, Janik, Lauraitytė, Laakasuo, Liefgreen, Neiders, Próchnicki, Rosas, Sundvall and Żuradzki2022). In this way, rules reduce the cognitive burden of human interaction. Rules allow people to skip reasoning – one can rely on a predetermined course of action for what to do and what not to do; other considerations (e.g., moral, ethical, efficiency) can be brushed aside. Indeed, research suggests people feel a diminished sense of agency when following rules (Caspar, Cleeremans, & Haggard, Reference Caspar, Cleeremans and Haggard2018) and experience cognitive conflict when breaking them (Pfister et al., Reference Pfister, Wirth, Weller, Foerster and Schwarz2019).

Critically, rules are also extremely useful for understanding the behavior of others, as most people spend much of their time abiding by the law. Rule adherence can explain why people submit to taking their shoes off at the airport, returning their library books, driving on the left (or right) side of the road, paying their taxes, and avoiding plagiarism in their homework assignments. Rules can perhaps best describe people’s behavior within institutions, when their assigned roles take precedence over their personhood. People who join institutions are explicitly trained (e.g., given a company “bible”) on exactly what to do and how to do it. The obligation to comply with rules readily explains much coordinated behavior, and appreciating their importance complicates the apparent throughline the authors propose from worker bees to middle management. In sum, rules enable large-scale coordination, have roots in animal minds, are readily appreciated and adapted by children, and provide public, accessible attributions for behavior. Formal rules, then, do much of what the institutional stance is purported to do – no new system of social understanding required. The authors suggest we need “institutional norms,” but we already have norms bounded by social roles (e.g., Eagly & Wood, Reference Eagly and Wood2012); what we do need is a cognitive science of formalized rules.

When we understand rules as technology, a kind of cultural artifact (Franssen, Lokhorst, & Van de Poel, Reference Franssen, Lokhorst and Van de Poel2009), we can evaluate what kinds of social configurations they make more or less likely (Winner, Reference Winner1980). Rules create order, a turbo-charged way of controlling others, and give rise to inhumane forms of punishment (e.g., prison; see Wylie et al., Reference Wylie, Chiu, Dakin, Cunningham and Gantman2025). Rules can consolidate the power of the rule-makers, serving the interests of some to the detriment of others (Lukina, Reference Lukina2023; Wylie & Gantman, Reference Wylie and Gantman2023). Rules make institutions that make people ruleable.

Finally, the authors invoke Arendt’s coverage of Eichmann’s trial and legal defense of “just following orders” as a downside to taking the institutional stance. But this misunderstands Arendt and the power of rules. When she describes the Nazi bureaucrat as “thoughtless,” she does not mean that we understand him through the institutional stance, but rather that people embedded in institutions follow rules given to them without seriously considering the actions they mandate. This is not a downside of the institutional stance but a downside of institutional rules. It’s not the roles we play, it’s the rules we follow.