Rethinking Human Cognition: A Comparative Framework Bridging Biological Roots and Social Complexity

Across cognitive science, psychology, and the social sciences, human cognition is often examined in isolation—treating capacities such as tool use, cooperation, fairness sensitivity, and political strategy as uniquely human or culturally constructed. However, decades of research in primatology and comparative cognition reveal that these abilities also appear in our closest living relatives—the chimpanzees—suggesting they are not human inventions, but structured extensions of shared cognitive functions.

Here, we propose a comparative framework that bridges biological roots and social complexity by aligning core domains of human cognition—culture and learning, cooperation and joint action, social and goal inference, power and politics, morality and fairness, and species-general cognition—with functionally grounded mechanisms observed across species.

This perspective reframes human cognition not as a set of isolated higher-order faculties, but as a structured continuum grounded in biologically grounded mechanisms. It offers a foundation for integrative modeling across cognitive science, social theory, and computational approaches to social behaviour.

Much of psychology and the social sciences explains human behavior through vague abstractions—terms like “morality,” “cooperation,” or “culture”—as if they were symbolic constructs detached from cognition. This framing obscures the functional mechanisms that actually generate these behaviors.

In reality, many of these so-called uniquely human traits are observable in other species, not metaphorically, but as concrete behavioral patterns. By organizing chimpanzee behavior into cognitive domains, we show that these capacities are not cultural inventions, but structured elaborations of general-purpose mechanisms already present across species.

Reframing human cognition as a biological continuum matters because it reconnects social theory with something observable and testable. It allows us to build models of human behavior that are functionally explicit, biologically anchored, and no longer dependent on idealized social narratives.

By grounding high-level social and cognitive phenomena in explicit behavioral mechanisms, this framework replaces abstract narratives with structures that can be modeled, compared, and tested. Instead of treating human cognition as a uniquely symbolic or mental construct, it reframes it as a biological system continuous with other species.

This perspective dissolves the traditional boundaries separating psychology, anthropology, political science, and economics. What were once treated as isolated domains—“mind,” “culture,” “institutions,” and “society”—become coherent manifestations of a shared biological and cognitive substrate, expressed differently as these capacities extend, combine, or elaborate across species and contexts.

By shifting from metaphors to mechanisms, this approach opens a path toward a unified science of cognition and social behavior—one that explains complex human systems not through higher abstractions, but by showing how they emerge from shared, biologically grounded behavioral capacities. This mechanistic reframing provides a foundation for simulation, prediction, and cross-species comparison in ways previously inaccessible.