Jara-Ettinger and Dunham’s Institutional Stance (IS) is a valuable framework for understanding how humans navigate complex socio-cultural structures. Drawing an analogy with Dennett’s (Reference Dennett1987) intentional stance, the IS holds that we explain, predict, and reason about social behavior by making inferences about roles and behavior governed by institutional norms and expectations (Searle, Reference Searle1995). We share the authors’ aim of accounting for human capacities to understand and represent actions within institutional structures, a capacity central to human social cognition. However, we argue that the proposed IS framework cannot fully account for the normative dimension of institutional life.

The core issue is that on any standard definition of institutional phenomena (cf., Giddens, Reference Giddens1984; Hodgson, Reference Hodgson2006; Searle, Reference Searle1995, Reference Searle2010; Turner, Reference Turner1997), the IS account must go beyond merely predicting and explaining human actions. It must account for the binding nature of such phenomena, explaining how prescriptions, obligations, entitlements, and justifications come to carry normative force (Schmidt & Rakoczy, Reference Schmidt and Rakoczy2023). As formulated, the IS acknowledges the importance of normativity, but fails to fully capture the central distinction between descriptive and normative expectations. Institutional cognition requires more than predicting how someone will act (e.g., by attributing individual mental states). It requires a representation of how someone ought to act according to shared norms governing the social role they are enacting (i.e., based on collective mental states).

For example, consider a simple, everyday example: your local barista. Our expectations for how the barista enacts their role are not merely predictive. They also have normative force and what Searle (Reference Searle1983) termed a world-to-mind direction of fit. If the barista fails to perform the role as normatively expected – say, serving the tallest customers first, acting unfriendly, or simply failing to say when our drink is ready – we expect and may enforce some consequence ourselves. This would likely be true, all things considered, even if we travel to a café thousands of miles away.

At its core, this limitation in the current formulation of the IS stems from an inherent problem with purely third-person (here, theory-theory) approaches to normativity (Sellars, Reference Sellars1963; Strawson, Reference Strawson1962). From day one, humans are “thrown in” to a normatively prestructured world full of rules, traditions, roles, and meanings (Heidegger, Reference Heidegger1927/Reference Heidegger1984; Vygotsky, Reference Vygotsky1978). Correspondingly, humans have early social motivations to participate in social interactions and to be part of a group or collective, learning step by step how “we” do things. Notably, to feel the binding force of norms, being embedded/participating in early (and later) social interactions is not optional, but necessary. A detached observer, as an individual adopting the IS would be, might predict and explain others’ behavior in institutional contexts. But they would have little reason to hold either themselves or others to social norms, because expectations within a purely causal-explanatory framework lack normative force. A solitary modeler computing institutional regularities from the outside might be analogous to an observer from an intelligent alien species lacking social norms. They can make predictions from patterns of behavior, but cannot feel the deontic “oughtness” of norms – the expectations, entitlements, and obligations that make institutions and the roles they govern what they are.

Young children’s understanding of human action is not merely predictive, but represents socio-affective and normative dimensions from early on. Eighteen-month-olds display concern in response to moral, but not conventional, transgressions (Kassecker, Verschoor, & Schmidt, Reference Kassecker, Verschoor and Schmidt2023), and correct nonconforming actions by others (Schmidt, Rakoczy, & Tomasello, Reference Schmidt, Rakoczy and Tomasello2019). By age three, children protest when others violate norms within institutional structures, including game rules, ownership conventions, and entitlements (Rakoczy, Warneken, & Tomasello, Reference Rakoczy, Warneken and Tomasello2008; Schmidt, Rakoczy, & Tomasello, Reference Schmidt, Rakoczy and Tomasello2013), even without explicit institutional framing (Schmidt et al., Reference Schmidt, Butler, Heinz and Tomasello2016). This early norm enforcement goes well beyond mere prediction. When children see a puppet break a rule, they are not merely surprised. They protest, correct, and sanction, clearly understanding the action should not have occurred. Preschoolers even extend this to individual epistemic states and speech acts (Butler et al., Reference Butler, Schmidt, Tavassolie and Gibbs2018; Fedra & Schmidt, Reference Fedra and Schmidt2019; Rakoczy & Tomasello, Reference Rakoczy and Tomasello2009), something the IS has difficulty in capturing and delegates to the non-normative institutional stance. Overall, the tendency to rapidly infer normative structure from minimal input (Schmidt et al., Reference Schmidt, Butler, Heinz and Tomasello2016; Wolf et al., Reference Wolf, Iva, Larsen and Tomasello2026) cannot be wholly explained by a purely predictive IS framework.

We propose that the IS would be better conceptualized not as a separate stance analogous to the intentional stance, but rather as a sophisticated aspect, another dimension of social cognition enabled by and built upon shared intentionality (Schmidt & Tomasello, Reference Schmidt and Tomasello2012; Tomasello et al., Reference Tomasello, Carpenter, Call, Behne and Moll2005; Tomasello, Reference Tomasello2019). Understanding institutions means understanding norms and roles, and thus grasping that members of a group collectively accept that roles carry certain obligations and entitlements. This shared or “we-intentional” perspective helps supply the normative force absent in the proposed framework. To return to our previous example, a barista’s obligations (and entitlements) are not directly observable from behavioral regularities. Rather, participants in the institution (customers, baristas, other employees) jointly recognize and hold one another accountable to their collective obligations and entitlements (Searle, Reference Searle1995, Reference Searle2010). From a developmental perspective, we suggest that children do not only layer on normative understanding after having observed sufficient behavior in a given context. Rather, they engage in shared practices from early in life, providing the basis and giving rise to both institutional understanding and normative cognition simultaneously (Schmidt & Rakoczy, Reference Schmidt and Rakoczy2023).

This reconceptualization of the IS framework has multiple advantages. It is more parsimonious, connecting the IS to extensive literature on norm psychology and its development without positing an independent framework that must be coherently integrated with other stances. It also resolves concerns stemming from a purely third-person formulation of the IS. Shared intentionality supports that perspective, but also provides both the first-person plural and second-person perspectives necessary for normative force. We encourage the authors to integrate this participatory, normative dimension into their otherwise promising account of institutional cognition.