printTheoretical Reconstruction of Sociality in the Context of Neurocognitive Studies and Evolutionary Anthropology
Tikhonova S.V.
Dr. Sci. (Philos.), Dr. Sci. (Law), Prof., Prof. of the Department of Theoretical and Social Philosophy, Saratov State University, Saratov, Russia segedasv@yandex.ru
The research was carried out at the expense of the grant of the Russian Science Foundation No. 25-28-03014.
Tikhonova S.V. Theoretical Reconstruction of Sociality in the Context of Neurocognitive Studies and Evolutionary Anthropology. Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya [Sociological Studies]. 2026. No 6. P. 3-12
The author reinterprets sociality as the anthropological foundation of sociogenesis. It is proposed to study sociality as a dynamic capacity of people to form and maintain connections based on cognitive and affective mechanisms of shared experience. The ideas developed draw on data from neurocognitive science and evolutionary anthropology to demonstrate how universal mechanisms of perception, synchronization, and prediction of others’ actions provide pre-institutional conditions for the emergence of society. The increasing complexity of social systems is grounded in protomediality allowing people to overcome the cognitive limitations of small groups through architectural, ritual, and material means of collective interaction. The transition from bodily-sensory forms of communication to protomedial structures becomes the basis for the emergence of large settlements and evolution of longdistance communication systems (primarily writing). Anthropological reassembly of the sociality category is important in the context of the digital society algorithmic institutionalization where new media and platform infrastructures are restructuring the joint attention, trust, and coordination mechanisms.
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