How do humans build and navigate their complex social world? Standard theoretical frameworks often attribute this success to a foundational capacity to analyze other people’s appearance and behavior to make inferences about their unobservable mental states. Here we argue that this picture is incomplete. Human behavior leaves traces in our physical environment that reveal our presence, our goals, and even our beliefs and knowledge. A new body of research shows that, from early in life, humans easily detect these traces—sometimes spontaneously—and readily extract social information from the physical world. From the features and placement of inanimate objects, people make inferences about past events and how people have shaped the physical world. This capacity develops early and helps explain how people have such a rich understanding of others: by drawing not only on how others act but also on the environments they have shaped. Overall, social cognition is crucial not only to our reasoning about people and actions but also to our everyday reasoning about the inanimate world.

中文翻译：

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我们过去的痕迹：物质世界的社会表征


人类如何构建和驾驭复杂的社交世界？标准理论框架通常将这种成功归因于分析他人的外表和行为以推断他们不可观察的心理状态的基本能力。在这里我们认为这张图是不完整的。人类行为在我们的物理环境中留下痕迹，揭示我们的存在、我们的目标，甚至我们的信仰和知识。一项新的研究表明，从生命的早期开始，人类就很容易发现这些痕迹（有时是自发的），并很容易从物理世界中提取社会信息。人们根据无生命物体的特征和位置来推断过去的事件以及人们如何塑造物质世界。这种能力很早就发展起来，有助于解释人们如何对他人有如此丰富的理解：不仅通过借鉴他人的行为方式，而且还借鉴他们所塑造的环境。总的来说，社会认知不仅对我们对人和行为的推理至关重要，而且对我们对无生命世界的日常推理也至关重要。