Thomas’s impressive article demonstrates that children identify social relationships and use them as a basis for inference and action. Showing that relationship-based reasoning emerges so early in life is groundbreaking. Until recently, the social domain was indeed viewed from a mentalistic perspective: it was thought to consist, ontologically, of mental states and, cognitively, of mindreading (for a critical discussion, see Kaufmann & Clément, Reference Kaufmann and Clément2014). Setting aside this mentalistic view, Thomas’s research confirms that very young children can connect perceptual cues, such as large body size, to abstract knowledge about relational models – in this case, authority ranking.
Her studies on communal sharing provide strong evidence for this two-level cognitive processing. In Thomas et al., toddlers and infants identify concrete features of interactions (saliva sharing and food licking) to infer the nature of a social relationship (intimacy) and then use this inferred relationship to predict seemingly unrelated behaviors (helping someone in distress). Remarkably, children appear to set aside the individual traits of the characters involved (an actress’s prosociality) and instead reason on the relationship itself. Furthermore, children interpret saliva sharing – but not ball playing or toy sharing – as a cue for intimacy. This suggests that they distinguish between strong, thick relationships, which involve bodily intimacy and emotional engagement, and weak ties, characterized by minimally engaging activities such as ball playing.
Thomas’s fascinating line of research opens the door to a productive dialogue between developmental psychology and the social sciences, the latter of which regard relationships as their conceptual primitives. However, this dialogue seems to stall partway. One reason, somewhat paradoxically, is that developmental studies on intuitive sociology often fail to engage with a well-established insight from scholarly sociology: the intrinsic connection between social relationships and the norms and rules that, as I will argue, constitute the crucial missing link between the representation of social relationships and what Thomas refers to as “contextual cues.” To substantiate this claim, I will examine the rights and duties that social relationships entail, as well as the nature of the predictions that their cognitive representation allows.
Rights, duties, and social relationships
To Thomas, “the relationship’s strength is the representation – and the mutual awareness – of obligations (the extent to which certain actions are expected), and commitment (the likelihood that people will continue the relationship)” (p.5). And yet, social relationships cannot be reduced to mere cognitive representations. They exist beyond a floating “in-between” of mutual awareness and possess an objective, impersonal, and public dimension that goes beyond the contextual cues individuals may be aware of. When a teacher meets a student at a university, their expectations are primarily shaped by their roles and the rights and duties defined by the institutional setting. The teacher is expected to transmit knowledge, and the student is expected to learn from the teacher. Even if the relationship becomes more informal, this shift adjusts rather than replaces the underlying structure. What does this mean? It means that social relationships are anchored in the situations that “afford” them and in the normative rules that reinforce them. In this light, relational models may be more accurately conceived as relational frames, a term that captures both their cognitive dimension and their grounding in rule-governed situations.
The workings of predictions
As Thomas put it, “the function of relationship representation is to allow humans to make sense of interactions between individuals, updating predictions about whether and how people will interact” (p.4). However, there are two qualitatively different processes on which social predictions may be based. The first type of prediction is based on experience, statistical regularities, or commonly observed responses in specific social situations – that is, what usually happens. This is this probabilistic kind of prediction that Thomas seems to favor: relationship representation may be a computational process involving the assignment of probabilities to each relational model. For instance, a relationship with a colleague could be evaluated as “3/10 on authority ranking, 9/10 on equality matching, and 1/10 on communal sharing” (p. 25). The second type of prediction, based on normative rules, has a quality of obligatoriness or “strength” that probabilities and regularities lack (Clément et al., Reference Clément, Bernard and Kaufmann2011; Rakoczy & Schmidt, Reference Rakoczy and Schmidt2012). While regularities pertain to factual observations and follow a logic of repetition and conformity, rules exhibit a higher level of constraint, sanction, and imposition. The distinction between these two social prediction mechanisms – probability vs normativity – has significant implications: it separates what is from what ought to be, what people normally do from what they should do according to social norms or moral ideals. As the sociologist Emile Durkheim ironically suggested long ago, this distinction is consequential: it allows one to distinguish the “average man” from the “ideal man.”
My point is that navigating the social world involves both descriptive and normative representations of social relationships. This is what my colleagues and I tested in an experiment we termed the Robin Hood paradigm (Charafeddine et al., Reference Charafeddine, Mercier, Clément, Kaufmann, Reboul and Van der Henst2016). When confronted with an asymmetrical relationship between dominant and subordinate individuals, children of different ages did not treat it in the same way. Children between three and five years of age favored the dominant individual, or the boss, who had already prevailed in previous games, thereby preserving the status quo – for example, by giving the dominant individual more goods. In contrast, children from five to eight years of age increasingly counterbalanced the relational asymmetry and favored the subordinate. Older children thus transitioned from normality to normativity, from a kind of social realism, based on observed authority ranking, to a normative stance, grounded in equality matching.
How to explain the “strength of the bond”?
According to anthropologist Marcel Mauss, it can be explained by “rights and duties” that constitute social relationships. Of course, this answer is only the beginning of the inquiry, not the end. The real challenge lies in articulating the impersonal, “objective” language of rights and duties with the subjective meaning the relationship holds for the “men, in their minds and in flesh and blood” who participate in it (Mauss, Reference Mauss2007: 89). Thomas’s stimulating studies represent a significant step in this direction.
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Thomas’s impressive article demonstrates that children identify social relationships and use them as a basis for inference and action. Showing that relationship-based reasoning emerges so early in life is groundbreaking. Until recently, the social domain was indeed viewed from a mentalistic perspective: it was thought to consist, ontologically, of mental states and, cognitively, of mindreading (for a critical discussion, see Kaufmann & Clément, Reference Kaufmann and Clément2014). Setting aside this mentalistic view, Thomas’s research confirms that very young children can connect perceptual cues, such as large body size, to abstract knowledge about relational models – in this case, authority ranking.
Her studies on communal sharing provide strong evidence for this two-level cognitive processing. In Thomas et al., toddlers and infants identify concrete features of interactions (saliva sharing and food licking) to infer the nature of a social relationship (intimacy) and then use this inferred relationship to predict seemingly unrelated behaviors (helping someone in distress). Remarkably, children appear to set aside the individual traits of the characters involved (an actress’s prosociality) and instead reason on the relationship itself. Furthermore, children interpret saliva sharing – but not ball playing or toy sharing – as a cue for intimacy. This suggests that they distinguish between strong, thick relationships, which involve bodily intimacy and emotional engagement, and weak ties, characterized by minimally engaging activities such as ball playing.
Thomas’s fascinating line of research opens the door to a productive dialogue between developmental psychology and the social sciences, the latter of which regard relationships as their conceptual primitives. However, this dialogue seems to stall partway. One reason, somewhat paradoxically, is that developmental studies on intuitive sociology often fail to engage with a well-established insight from scholarly sociology: the intrinsic connection between social relationships and the norms and rules that, as I will argue, constitute the crucial missing link between the representation of social relationships and what Thomas refers to as “contextual cues.” To substantiate this claim, I will examine the rights and duties that social relationships entail, as well as the nature of the predictions that their cognitive representation allows.
Rights, duties, and social relationships
To Thomas, “the relationship’s strength is the representation – and the mutual awareness – of obligations (the extent to which certain actions are expected), and commitment (the likelihood that people will continue the relationship)” (p.5). And yet, social relationships cannot be reduced to mere cognitive representations. They exist beyond a floating “in-between” of mutual awareness and possess an objective, impersonal, and public dimension that goes beyond the contextual cues individuals may be aware of. When a teacher meets a student at a university, their expectations are primarily shaped by their roles and the rights and duties defined by the institutional setting. The teacher is expected to transmit knowledge, and the student is expected to learn from the teacher. Even if the relationship becomes more informal, this shift adjusts rather than replaces the underlying structure. What does this mean? It means that social relationships are anchored in the situations that “afford” them and in the normative rules that reinforce them. In this light, relational models may be more accurately conceived as relational frames, a term that captures both their cognitive dimension and their grounding in rule-governed situations.
The workings of predictions
As Thomas put it, “the function of relationship representation is to allow humans to make sense of interactions between individuals, updating predictions about whether and how people will interact” (p.4). However, there are two qualitatively different processes on which social predictions may be based. The first type of prediction is based on experience, statistical regularities, or commonly observed responses in specific social situations – that is, what usually happens. This is this probabilistic kind of prediction that Thomas seems to favor: relationship representation may be a computational process involving the assignment of probabilities to each relational model. For instance, a relationship with a colleague could be evaluated as “3/10 on authority ranking, 9/10 on equality matching, and 1/10 on communal sharing” (p. 25). The second type of prediction, based on normative rules, has a quality of obligatoriness or “strength” that probabilities and regularities lack (Clément et al., Reference Clément, Bernard and Kaufmann2011; Rakoczy & Schmidt, Reference Rakoczy and Schmidt2012). While regularities pertain to factual observations and follow a logic of repetition and conformity, rules exhibit a higher level of constraint, sanction, and imposition. The distinction between these two social prediction mechanisms – probability vs normativity – has significant implications: it separates what is from what ought to be, what people normally do from what they should do according to social norms or moral ideals. As the sociologist Emile Durkheim ironically suggested long ago, this distinction is consequential: it allows one to distinguish the “average man” from the “ideal man.”
My point is that navigating the social world involves both descriptive and normative representations of social relationships. This is what my colleagues and I tested in an experiment we termed the Robin Hood paradigm (Charafeddine et al., Reference Charafeddine, Mercier, Clément, Kaufmann, Reboul and Van der Henst2016). When confronted with an asymmetrical relationship between dominant and subordinate individuals, children of different ages did not treat it in the same way. Children between three and five years of age favored the dominant individual, or the boss, who had already prevailed in previous games, thereby preserving the status quo – for example, by giving the dominant individual more goods. In contrast, children from five to eight years of age increasingly counterbalanced the relational asymmetry and favored the subordinate. Older children thus transitioned from normality to normativity, from a kind of social realism, based on observed authority ranking, to a normative stance, grounded in equality matching.
How to explain the “strength of the bond”?
According to anthropologist Marcel Mauss, it can be explained by “rights and duties” that constitute social relationships. Of course, this answer is only the beginning of the inquiry, not the end. The real challenge lies in articulating the impersonal, “objective” language of rights and duties with the subjective meaning the relationship holds for the “men, in their minds and in flesh and blood” who participate in it (Mauss, Reference Mauss2007: 89). Thomas’s stimulating studies represent a significant step in this direction.
Financial support
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
Competing interests
None.