The learnability of the social world requires that some core, abstract primitives guide attention to its underlying relational structure so that likely and appropriate forms of interaction (costs and benefits) may be predicted and motivated throughout social life (Fiske, Reference Fiske1991, Reference Fiske1992; Fiske, Thomsen, & Thein, Reference Fiske, Thomsen and Thein2009; Sheehy-Skeffington & Thomsen, Reference Sheehy-Skeffington and Thomsen2020; Thomsen, Reference Thomsen2020; Thomsen & Carey, Reference Thomsen, Carey, Banaji and Gelman2013; Thomsen, Frankenhuis, Ingold-Smith, & Carey, Reference Thomsen, Frankenhuis, Ingold-Smith and Carey2011).

Pietraszewski points out that much social psychological, intergroup theory takes for granted the concept of <group> and argues (a) why the concept of group is evolvable and (b) that engagement in primitive triadic conflict roles carries critical information about who is in a group alliance with whom. Indeed, one might argue that the meaning of <group alliance> – or as the author puts it “group in the context of conflict” – is <a set of agents who help each other in conflict>. Pietraszewski's careful elaboration of how the meaning of group alliance relates to triadic conflict primitives is thought-provoking and valuable for social and cognitive psychological theory. But it does not yet solve the question of what is the structural representation of the conceptual primitive <group>: Although we intuitively infer the existence of groups based on how people help or hinder each other in conflict, this does not entail that group reduces to engagement in triadic conflict roles and so does not solve what the <group> concept we infer is.

Although between-group conflict likely characterized the evolutionary context of humans (cf. e.g., Richerson & Boyd, Reference Richerson and Boyd2008), groups coordinate and cooperate in many more ways than antagonistic conflict, and so any universal concept of “any and all groups” should also undergird these forms of non-conflict related solidarity – for instance, cooperative child care or the redistribution of resources within the group to help the young, sick, and old. Hence, what we infer from evidence of triadic conflict roles must be a group axiom which should also undergird the above cooperative practices, rather than a summary concept of <group-in-conflict> based only on triadic conflict primitives. If not, a strict conflict primitives proposal must either imply that “group” basically means something different in, say, the statements of “a group should work together,” “a group has to help those who are in need through no fault of their own,” “a group has to first take care of its own,” and “a group has to stand together against its aggressors”; or, alternatively, demonstrate that non-conflict-based forms of group cooperation are also undergirded by triadic conflict primitives (as, for now, unsuccessfully attempted by the author for the case of reciprocity).

I instead posit that we use the word group in each of the above sentences simply because we mean the same by it – conflict or not – namely, a bounded, communal, solidary, merged, or fused unity of people whom and whose interests we treat as one for the purposes at hand (cf. Fiske, Reference Fiske1991; Fiske et al., Reference Fiske, Thomsen and Thein2009; Thomsen & Carey, Reference Thomsen, Carey, Banaji and Gelman2013; Thomsen & Fiske, Reference Thomsen and Fiske2018). Pietraszewski writes that many existing theories about social groups are “simply metaphorical (typically a subsumption or containment metaphor)” (in the abstract), and he argues that such a container metaphor cannot account for shifting or superordinate identities and that the metaphor cannot be literally correct because individual people know that they are not the same individuals. According to Pietraszewski, this demonstrates “the danger of intuitive theoretical reasoning.”

Yet a simple straightforward theoretical alternative is that the reason researchers and lay-people alike intuitively and effortlessly use conceptual container, subsumption, and unity metaphors – which are found across language families and cultural practices – to speak about social groups is that these are, in fact, the forms of thought that humans use to reason about groups (cf. Fiske, Reference Fiske1991, Reference Fiske1992; Kovecses, Reference Kovecses2010). Of course, cognitive heuristics or summary representations do not have to be literally true to function. And container representations can, in fact, describe the example of shifting social identities where two groups of former enemies unite (sic!) against a third one, by simply subsuming two social containers within a superordinate, common one. This also highlights the convenient computational fact that container schemas embed recursively.

I agree with Pietraszewski that the very act of categorization cannot itself be what group representations are about. Instead, the core, critical information must be the relational features for how costs and benefits are shared in solidary ways within the categorized groups. One theory already on the market which makes this explicit assumption about communal groups – in a manner not bound to conflict roles – is relational models theory and its prediction that universal evolved core relational primitives manifest already in early childhood (Fiske, Reference Fiske1991, Reference Fiske1992; Thomsen & Carey, Reference Thomsen, Carey, Banaji and Gelman2013; Thomsen & Fiske, Reference Thomsen and Fiske2018). It makes the argument that uniting “as one” may foster extraordinary acts of solidary sacrifice, and that we infer and feel the existence of solidary unity based on such sacrifice. Identity fusion theory makes similar points (e.g., Whitehouse, Reference Whitehouse2018).

Pietraszewski points out that summary group representations must scale up to social identities and assumes that this is possible by simply treating people with the same social identity as interchangeable with respect to the triadic conflict-role slots. However, the key question remains how that is possible: How do we know that people are interchangeable with respect to triadic conflict roles – what is the structure of the cognitive architecture that makes it possible to think of several individual people in this way as “one and the same”? I posit that these inferences are precisely what the concept of group licenses, and that it takes the structural form of a bounded unity/in-out categorical container between individuals so that they are treated, and treat each, other “as one,” greater than each individual, for the purposes at hand (cf. Fiske, Reference Fiske1991; Thomsen & Carey, Reference Thomsen, Carey, Banaji and Gelman2013; Thomsen & Fiske, Reference Thomsen and Fiske2018). As the peasants in the village Fuente respond in the play Fuenteovejuna when they are all tortured to make them reveal which of them killed a military commander: Fuente did it (Lope de Vega, Reference Lope de Vega1619/1977).