Normative cognition: a uniquely human cognitive capacity

Normative cognition – a uniquely human cognitive capacity ’Normative cognition’ is a ’mongrel’ concept covering human cognition of symbolically mediated normative information. Humans have social and cultural cognition of which normative cognition is a subset. Humans can produce, distribute, acquire and implement social norms and values. Normative cognition requires certain cognitive skills such as 1) learning, remembering and 2) having capabilities in using symbols, concepts and norms as cognitive tools. Thus normative cognition 1) provides governance in cognizing and 2) aids in predicting probable ranges of behavior in self and others Minds create ecologies for other minds in normative conceptual systems: ’models for the world’ (in scripts / programs / frames...) and ’models of the world’ (socio-cultural classification systems) provide: Shared world-views and action patterns. Normative cultural and collective institutions are social cognition devices: tools for minds in high-level predictive coding and pattern recognition provide complexity reduction in social systems.