Institutions as Robust and Resilient, Dynamic, Human, Time-Travelling, Cognitive Communities

Institutions are a pervasive feature of human social life, but psychological science has largely ceded the study of institutions to disciplines such as economics, sociology, political science, history, and law. These other disciplines treat institutions as the abstract ‘rules of the game’ in society (economics), or as enduring social structures such as the family, law courts, and government, around which society is organized (sociology; law). Missing from these other disciplines is a serious attempt to place the study of institutions on secure psychological and neurobiological microfoundations (including understanding why humans alone create and maintain institutions, for institutions do not feature in the social life of any other social species (including of our closest non-human primate relatives). Here, I argue we should treat institutions as vital objects of psychological enquiry, viewing them as dynamic, human, robust and resilient, time-traveling, cognitive communities. In this framework, institutions are not rulebooks, social structures, or the ‘rules of the game’ in a society, but are living, adaptive, action-oriented, networks of collective memory, shared narratives, and distributed decision-making which generate an enduring cognitive surplus (the additional resources and capacities emerging when individuals engage in shared, collective cognitive processes). Individual neurocognitive processes—like language, memory, mental time travel, and social learning—when exercised collectively and cooperatively enable us to form time-travelling, cognitive communities (institutions). This approach enriches other disciplinary approaches by grounding them in the empirical realities of human behavior, as well as opening a new field of scholarly inquiry—a transdisciplinary domain integrating cognitive neuroscience, social psychology, organizational theory, economics, and sociology.