The Institutional Stance - an evolved intuitive theory?

I have just been sent an article by BBS (Brain and Behavioral Sciences) that is soliciting commentaries on an article by Jara-Ettinger and Dunham titled "The Institutional Stance" that suggests that we have an inherited ability not only to represent other minds, but also to represent social institutional structures. Motivated readers can obtain a copy of the article from me. Here is its abstract:

Human success in navigating the social world is typically attributed to our capacity to represent other minds—a mentalistic stance. We argue that humans are endowed with a second equally powerful intuitive theory: an institutional stance. In contrast to the mentalistic stance, which helps us predict and explain unconstrained behavior via unobservable mental states, the institutional stance interprets social interactions in terms of role-based structures that constrain and regulate behavior via rule-like behavioral expectations. We argue that this stance is supported by a generative grammar that builds structured models of social collectives, enabling people to rapidly infer, track, and manipulate the social world. The institutional stance emerges early in development and its precursors can be traced across social species, but its full-fledged generative capacity is uniquely human. Once in place, the ability to reason about institutional structures takes on a causal role, allowing people to create and modify social structures, supporting new forms of institutional life. Human social cognition is best understood as an interplay between a system for representing the unconstrained behavior of individuals in terms of minds and a system for representing the constrained behavior of social collectives in terms of institutional structures composed of interlocking sets of roles.

What our brains are doing as we experience musical pleasure.

I've been playing more Schubert lately, drawn by his genius for inserting melodic sections within his piano works (sonatas, impromptus, fantasies, etc.) that give me sheer pleasure when I play them. (When I am beginning to wake in the morning, the passages play in my head and I can visualize both my fingers on the keys and the musical score. As I continue to wake, this all slips away.) 

These experiences made me perk up when I saw the article by Zatorre and collaborators in the Jan. 2026 issue of Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. Here is their abstract (motivated readers can obtain a PDF of the article from me. It has some nice graphics.): 

The enjoyment of music involves a complex interplay between brain perceptual areas and the reward network. While previous studies have shown that musical liking is related to an enhancement of synchronization between the right temporal and frontal brain regions via theta frequency band oscillations, the underlying mechanisms of this interaction remain elusive. Specifically, a causal relationship between theta oscillations and musical pleasure has yet to be shown. In the present study, we address this question by using transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS). Twenty-four participants underwent three different sessions where they received tACS over the right auditory cortex before listening to and rating a set of melodies selected to vary in familiarity and complexity. In the target session, participants received theta stimulation, while in the other two sessions, they received beta and sham stimulation, serving as controls. We recorded brain activity using EEG during task performance to confirm the effects of tACS on oscillatory activity. Results revealed that compared with sham, theta, but not beta, stimulation resulted in higher liking ratings specifically for unfamiliar music with low complexity. In addition, we found increased theta connectivity between the right temporal and frontal electrodes for these stimuli when they were most liked after theta stimulation but not after beta stimulation. These findings support a causal and frequency-specific relationship between music hedonic judgments and theta oscillatory mechanisms that synchronize the right temporal and frontal areas. These mechanisms play a crucial role in different cognitive processes supported by frontotemporal loops, such as auditory working memory and predictive processing, which are fundamental to music reward processing.