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Central to Pietraszewski's computational theory of groups is a set of group-constitutive roles within four triadic primitives. To be considered part of a group, he argues that individuals are obligated to occupy such roles during conflict. Such building blocks for representing groups, if part of humans' evolved psychology, could be present ontogenetically and perhaps phylogenetically. Although some data from the developmental and biological sciences support Pietraszewski's theory, other data raises questions about whether “group membership applies to all of the triadic primitives” (sect. 7, sect. 2) and whether similar behavioral expectations hold across various ecological conditions and interactions. In reviewing this work, we open the door to discuss a broader set of conceptual primitives that support reasoning about groups.
Several studies have examined infants' capacity to reason about social groups, revealing that they are capable of making inferences about multi-agent conflict, and the types of behaviors that should be directed toward ingroup versus outgroup members (Pun, Birch, & Baron, 2016, 2021; Rhodes, Hetherington, Brink, & Wellman, 2015). For example, when 16-month-old infants witnessed a conflict between two agents from opposing groups, they were more surprised when these agents' social partners cooperated (instead of conflicted) with one another (Rhodes et al., 2015). This result is consistent with Pietraszewski's triadic primitive generalization, in which a conflict between two agents from opposing groups can be extended to another, uninvolved member of a group.
Research with infants as young as 9 months of age supports the early emergence of the primitives defense and alliance (Pun, Birch, & Baron, 2021). Specifically, after watching two agents from opposing groups come into conflict, infants expected an ingroup member...