Chater and Christiansen (C&C) offer a compelling account of how cultural complexity arises through social tinkering – the gradual accumulation of ad hoc innovations to social rules that coordinate behavior. Their framework identifies six stages through which directed, myopic problem-solving generates spontaneous order in languages, moral codes, institutions, and other cultural systems. Yet while they mention “artistic traditions” among the formations that emerge through this process, they do not address the distinctive contribution the arts make to social tinkering itself. This is not a minor omission. C&C acknowledge that increasing cultural complexity creates escalating demands on individual cognition as enculturation requires learning to navigate ever more intricate systems of rules, conventions, and representations. But their framework does not specify what developmental mechanisms equip individuals with the sophisticated social-cognitive capacities that this demands, nor where the variation that feeds recombination originates. We argue that the arts address both gaps, functioning not as passive byproducts of spontaneous order but as essential engines of the tinkering that produces it.

First, the arts are specialized variation generators. C&C emphasize that tinkering involves reuse, adaptation, and recombination of past solutions, and that cultural rules function as Schelling focal points: cognitively natural coordination solutions shaped by prior generations of learners. But this account raises an underexplored question: what mechanisms expand the space of available focal points? If tinkering is directed but myopic, and if precedents constrain future solutions, the system risks convergence on a narrow set of coordination equilibria. The arts systematically counter this tendency. Through fiction, music, visual arts, and performance, humans generate alternative social models, scenarios, and identities that expand the repertoire of conceivable precedents beyond what consequential interaction alone could produce (Boyd, Reference Boyd2009; Gabora, Reference Gabora2017). Sperber (Reference Sperber1996) argued that artistic innovations generate an ongoing supply of new mental representations competing for cultural adoption, with the most cognitively resonant ones spreading through social networks. The European Renaissance illustrates this mechanism: exposure to innovative secular arts expanded audiences’ perceptual predictions and worldviews, stimulating scientific creativity and coevolving with more pluralistic social values (Bortolotti et al., Reference Bortolotti, Conti, Romagnoli and Sacco2024). The arts thus inject the variability that prevents the tinkering process from stagnating at locally optimal but globally suboptimal coordination solutions.

Second, the arts provide protected experimentation spaces: cognitive sandboxes where social innovations can be explored without the costs and risks of real-world deployment. This matters because C&C’s framework, by definition, locates tinkering within consequential social interactions: a failed innovation can damage relationships, status, or coordination, creating conservative pressures that favor established precedents over risky exploration. The arts create parallel domains where the constraints of real social stakes are temporarily suspended. Fiction functions as a simulation of complex social causality, engaging theory of mind reasoning by exposing individuals to diverse agents and perspectives (Dodell-Feder & Tamir, Reference Dodell-Feder and Tamir2018; Zunshine, Reference Zunshine2006). Music provides an abstracted relational sandbox where tracking nested patterns and predicting upcoming structures exercises cognitive skills that transfer to social domains (Cross, Reference Cross2012; Levitin, Reference Levitin2006). C&C rightly argue that cognitive development is better understood as skill learning than as theory acquisition. The arts are precisely the kind of structured, low-cost simulated practice environment that skill-based accounts require but that C&C’s framework does not specify (Bortolotti et al., Reference Bortolotti, Conti, Romagnoli and Sacco2024). They dramatically lower the cost of the exploratory variation that social tinkering requires.

Third, and most critically, the arts train the integrative cognitive capacities that make sophisticated social tinkering possible. C&C’s framework posits a virtuous cycle: more complex culture requires more sophisticated cognition, which drives further cultural innovation. But this cycle needs a mechanism that actually develops the relevant capacities in each generation of learners. Expert engagement with aesthetic domains, whether as creator or sophisticated audience member, involves significant modifications of neural architecture, from local circuit refinement to large-scale network reorganization (Bortolotti et al., Reference Bortolotti, Candeloro, Palumbo and Sacco2025). The coordinated activity of the salience network, default mode network, and central executive network during what we term “supercomplex experiences” creates emergent integrative properties directly relevant to navigating the social complexity that C&C describe. This neural coordination does not emerge spontaneously but requires sustained engagement with aesthetically and cognitively demanding experiences, a kind of training that the arts are uniquely positioned to provide.

Empirical evidence corroborates the view that cultural and creative environments function as incubators for the general cognitive capacities that underpin tinkering. Using OECD’s Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) data, Sacco, Bialowolski, and Weziak-Bialowolska (Reference Sacco, Bialowolski and Weziak-Bialowolska2025) found that workers in cultural and creative sectors demonstrate significantly higher levels of problem-solving, literacy, and numeracy, scoring approximately 25–31 points higher than workers in other sectors on all key information-processing competencies assessed. While the cross-sectional design prevents strong causal claims, these findings are consistent with a neurocognitive pathway through which sustained cultural and creative engagement boosts general-domain skills (Bortolotti et al., Reference Bortolotti, Candeloro, Palumbo and Sacco2025). They also complement well-documented evidence that cultural participation fosters pro-social attitudes and cooperative dispositions (Hasson et al., Reference Hasson, Amir, Sobol-Sarag, Tamir and Halperin2022), the motivational substrate that sustained cooperative tinkering demands.

C&C’s framework focuses on the what (precedent-setting, adaptation, recombination) and the where (social interactions requiring coordination) of cultural complexification, but underspecifies the how. The arts occupy a distinctive functional niche that crosscuts the six stages: generating variation that feeds into social tinkering at Stages 3–5, providing protected spaces where innovations can be tested before consequential deployment, and training the cognitive and pro-social capacities that enable sophisticated tinkering at all stages. Rather than adding a new stage, we propose that the arts constitute a parallel enabling track, a cognitive-cultural infrastructure without which the tinkering processes that C&C describe would face both an impoverished repertoire and an insufficiently trained cognitive workforce. These three functions interact in a self-reinforcing loop that enriches C&C’s proposed virtuous cycle: richer artistic culture enables more creative tinkering, generating coordination challenges that stimulate further exploration, while aesthetic engagement provides each generation with the integrative capacities that the previous generation’s tinkering demands. Any comprehensive account of how cultural complexity emerges must reckon with the arts as active accelerators of the tinkering that produces it.