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

Research on human cognition, behavior, and society typically studies human phenomena without first clarifying the roots from which they arise. As a result, many accounts rely on narrative interpretations and loosely defined constructs, treating the capacities behind these phenomena as culturally constructed or as emergent products of social complexity. This has contributed to unstable findings and persistent difficulties in replication. Yet decades of research in primatology and comparative cognition reveal that many of these capacities also appear in our closest living relatives, chimpanzees, suggesting that 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 shared biological substrates—with functionally comparable capacities observed across species. This perspective reframes human cognition not as a set of isolated higher-order faculties, but as a structured continuum built from shared biological and cognitive foundations. It offers an empirical foundation for studying human cognition, moving beyond loosely defined constructs and narrative accounts toward a comparative, mechanism-based science.