Conceptual exploration of how cognitive knowledge of social ties forms social network representations, suggesting their impact on behavior.
Thomas’ paper provides a compelling account of the nature and development of mental representations of social relationships. Understandably, it focuses on dyadic and triadic relationships. We emphasize the need to elucidate the development of another key component of humans’ understanding of social relationships: “stitching together” knowledge of social ties into representations of social networks that shape one’s thoughts and actions.
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Parkinson et al. (2026) studied this question.
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