What are institutions made of?

How do people understand a social world built from hundreds of interconnected social structures? The commentaries on our proposed answer, the institutional stance, clustered around three questions: (1) What is the conceptual structure within the stance and where does it come from? (2) How does the stance integrate with mentalizing, and to what extent are they separate systems? (3) What changes when we think of people not as observers of social life but as participants in it? The commentaries also highlight new aspects of social cognition we had not considered but which may fall within the stance's scope. Here we address these questions and challenges, clarify key aspects of our account, and offer friendly amendments and future empirical directions aimed at addressing important challenges raised in the comments.