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 functions in observable cognitive behavior, this survey opens a path toward modeling society from the bottom up—using mechanisms, not metaphors.

This approach dissolves the artificial boundaries between disciplines like psychology, anthropology, political science, and economics. What were once treated as separate domains of “mind,” “culture,” or “institutions” can now be understood as structured expressions of the same underlying cognitive functions.

Rather than studying society through detached abstractions, we can begin treating it as a compositional system—one that emerges from shared behavioral capacities across species. This reframing lays the groundwork for a unified science of social cognition, grounded not in speculation, but in mechanism.