Inferring the internal structure of groups through the integration of statistical learning and causal reasoning

Abstract

Abstract Human social life unfolds within richly structured networks of overlapping relationships, including friendships, hierarchies, and collaborations. Yet the observable interactions that reveal these networks are often sparse and noisy, making it unclear how people could infer the latent structure of their social environments from such limited evidence. We propose that humans integrate domain-general statistical learning with domain-specific models of social structures to rapidly construct causal representations that support explanation, prediction, and planning. Across three behavioral experiments, we show that participants can infer underlying social structures (Experiment 1), predict social behavior (Experiment 2), and reason about the spread of social influence (Experiment 3), based on brief, abstract videos of social interactions. These judgments were closely captured by a computational model grounded in our account and could not be explained by simpler cue-based accounts. Statistical learning and causal reasoning operate in concert to support rapid, flexible understanding of social structures.