The connections between the humanities and the social sciences have been especially close. In fact, these assumptions and inferences have been largely shared with the humanities and the arts, at least in the academic world. It is clear. . . that the general characteristics of human nature participate in the work of elaboration from which social life results. Collective representations, emotions, and tendencies are caused not by certain states of the consciousness of individuals but by the conditions in which the social group, in its totality, is placed. Their contribution consists exclusively in very general attitudes, in vague and consequently plastic predispositions which, by themselves, if other agents did not intervene, could not take on the definite and complex forms which characterize social phenomena.
Infants everywhere have the same developmental potential.
Althoughs infants are everywhere the same, adults everywhere differ profoundly in their behavioral and mental organization. Complexly organized adult behaviors are absent from infants. Infants must acquire adult mental organization from some external source in the course of development. This establishes that the social world is the cause of the mental organization of adults. The cultural and social elements that mold the individual precede the individual and are external to the individual.