The generative psychology of kinship: Part 1. Cognitive universals and evolutionary psychology

Human kinship and associated terminology vary a lot across cultures, but many anthropologists have suspected that a common set of principles underlies this variation. I argue that cross-cultural variation in kin classification is produced by a generative psychology built on two broad classes of rules. Some rules declare that kin differing with respect to binary distinctive features should be distinguished from one another, others identify some types of kin as more psychologically basic or prototypical than others. Different kin terminologies draw from the same set of rules, while variation among terminologies in how kin are split and merged results from variation in the ranking assigned to different rules. The rules governing kin classification seem to derive from three universal ‘‘primitives’’ of social cognition— innate schemas of genealogical distance, social rank, and group membership. These schemas may be part of an evolved psychology of kinship. This psychology has homologies with nonhuman primate social cognition; in humans, it is adapted to flexibly regulate the representation of relatedness in the service of individual and group nepotism. A companion paper spells out in more detail how the psychology of kinship generates and constrains known systems of kin classification. D 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.