Neither Human Normativity nor Human Groupness Are in Humanity’s Genes: A Commentary on Cecilia Heyes’s “Rethinking Norm Psychology”

Heyes presents a compelling account of how cultural evolutionary processes shape and create “rules,” or norms, of social behavior. She suggested that normativity depends on implicit, genetically inherited, domaingeneral processes and explicit, culturally inherited, domain-specific processes. Her approach challenges the nativist point of view and provides supporting evidence that shows how social interactions are responsible for creating mental processes that assist in understanding and behaving according to rules or norms. We agree. In our commentary, we suggest that it is not only that mental processes for grasping norms are recreated in each generation but also that social interactions shape the kinds of social groups that are recognized (for a more extensive discussion, see Kish Bar-On & Lamm, 2023). We highlight evidence showing that accounts of norm psychology thus require a richer notion of human groups. In her analysis of the characterization of norms and norm psychology in the literature, Heyes mentioned definitions of norms from several disciplines (e.g., Chudek & Henrich, 2011; Göckeritz et al., 2014; House, 2018) and critically prodded the relation between norms and rules. However, another concept reoccurs in almost every definition of norms, including the one she developed: the concept of human groups. A detailed picture of normative behavior must address the question of what human groups are, how they evolved, and how this affects normativity. According to Heyes, groups play a significant role in norm enforcement, compliance, and commentary. Within a group context, individuals learn which norms they should follow and which behaviors they should avoid and develop the ability to partake in commentary concerning what is appropriate, allowed, required, and forbidden in their groups. However, the types of evidence Heyes exploited in her discussion about the relation between implicit and explicit normativity are largely (although not entirely) based on experiments of economic games that, for the (justified) sake of simplicity, address groups as small, homogeneous, and stable. These types of evidence build on the hypothesis that small and noninteracting groups are appropriate models and represent the origins of human groups and norm psychology. However, this ignores a different evolutionary perspective supported by significant evidence, according to which human groups transitioned from closed social bands to open bands nested in a multilevel social community much earlier than was commonly thought—about 800,000 years ago (Layton & O’Hara, 2010; Sterelny, 2021; Stiner, 2002). The latter perspective, advocated by Kim Sterelny and others, urges researchers to reconsider work that takes groups to be simple and small and to consider the possibility that some economic experiments and other experimental and observational studies based their assumptions and results on an artifact, not on the natural phenomenon of groups. From the Pleistocene to the early Holocene, Sterelny’s (2021, pp. 57, 70–74) narrative demonstrates how Hominins exchanged the hierarchical social groups of their ancestors for more egalitarian bands, progressing from mutualistic cooperation centered around foraging and hunting to a more demanding framework of indirect reciprocation. Previous discussions have shown that social groups across species rapidly self-organize into hierarchies in which members vary in their level of power, influence, skill, or dominance (Gould, 2002; 1187391 PPSXXX10.1177/17456916231187391Kish Bar-On, LammPerspectives on Psychological Science research-article2023