Before institutions: The social and cognitive foundations of institutions.

We agree with J. Jara-Ettinger and Y. Dunham that social understanding cannot be reduced to mental-state attribution, but we challenge their view that role-based expectations are inherently institutional. Institutions require collective symbolic functions, unlike expectations that arise from recurring relational patterns. These patterns - what we call naïve sociology - underlie an elementary social stance that evolutionarily predates institutional reasoning and provides a more parsimonious basis for interpreting social behavior.