The emergence of “institutional” cognition

Institutional kinds like money, identification cards, and borders are a striking feature of human sociality, plausibly supporting many of the more complex configurations human societies take. Yet empirical work on the psychology of institutional kinds is sparse. I'll provide a brief introduction to the philosophy and psychology of institutional kinds and then present new theoretical and empirical work suggesting that institutional kinds are not just something we think about and make use of, but also something we think through, providing a powerful lens through which to predict and interpret social behavior.