The brain builds neural pathways by mapping statistical regularities in the environment---what predicts what, which features cluster together, what sequences typically follow. This applies to the physical world, but it also applies to the social world. Brains map social regularities: how people behave, what language makes available, which cultural practices coordinate patterns, what the community treats as naturally linked. This is social mapping---the same learning mechanisms that map perception to action also map the social environment's structure, and that structure shapes which neural patterns develop.

Social mapping works in both directions. First, you map others: observational learning means watching someone perform an action activates similar patterns in your brain as performing it yourself. Mirror systems, theory of mind, and social prediction all rely on your brain building models of what others will do based on learned regularities. You notice behaviour, encode it, and can reproduce it if you have the capacity and motivation. But crucially, you don't need to understand why it works---you just need to see it co-occur with outcomes often enough for the association to strengthen.

Second, the social world maps you: communities coordinate which patterns are salient through shared practices, language, and repeated interactions. When everyone around you treats certain ideas as naturally linked, your brain learns those chunks automatically. Language doesn't transmit thoughts---it provides scaffolding that makes certain distinctions natural, certain frames readily available, certain ways of chunking experience more fluent. The words your language has for emotions, spatial relations, time, kinship---these shape which patterns your brain finds easy to encode and retrieve. Cultural practices work the same way: what gets repeated, what gets reinforced, what the community coordinates---these become the environmental regularities your neural pathways map.

This is why belief systems stack in communities. Preppers share theory stacks about collapse and self-sufficiency. Alternative medicine adherents stack distrust of institutions with natural remedies. Mainstream scientists stack empirical methods with institutional authority. These aren't logical bundles---they're socially mapped chunks. The beliefs travel together because they co-occur in the social environment you're exposed to, and your brain maps that co-occurrence just like it would map any other environmental regularity. Reconstruction and retrieval then operate on these socially mapped patterns, reinforcing them each time they're activated.

Practically, this means changing patterns at scale requires changing social coordination. Arguing against a belief in isolation often fails because the belief is embedded in a socially mapped structure---challenge one element and the others activate in defence. To shift patterns, change the coordination: alter the practices that make certain links salient, introduce language or frames that chunk experience differently, shift which community someone is exposed to so they map different regularities. Social mapping is powerful because the same neural mechanisms that let individuals learn quickly also let communities scaffold what gets learned. Design the social environment and you shape what neural patterns develop.

Social networks have a topology that matters. Strong, dense ties within a group---what sociologists call bonding capital---build trust, loyalty, and coordination. Members know each other well, share norms, and can rely on mutual support. But the same density that enables trust also enables insularity: the group can become an echo chamber, reinforcing existing patterns and resisting outside information. Weak ties that bridge across groups---bridging capital---provide access to different information, different frames, different ways of chunking experience. They're less reliable for support but far more useful for learning, because they expose you to regularities your own group doesn't coordinate.

The dark side of social capital is network closure---when the density of ties makes monitoring and enforcement almost automatic. In a tight-knit group, everyone knows what everyone else is doing, deviation is noticed immediately, and sanctions are swift. This is powerful for coordination but dangerous for dissent. Cultures that have experienced persistent threat tend to develop tighter monitoring and stronger norms---what cross-cultural psychology calls tight cultures. The mechanism is straightforward: threat increases the value of coordinated behaviour, which increases monitoring density, which increases the certainty of sanctions for deviance, which constrains individual behaviour. The norms themselves may be adaptive or harmful; the enforcement infrastructure doesn't distinguish.

This has a counterintuitive implication for authority and obedience. The classic Milgram experiments are usually read as evidence that people blindly obey authority. But a closer reading suggests something more interesting: participants who continued weren't obeying mindlessly---they were engaged with the experimenter's mission because the experimenter represented their in-group identity as contributors to science. Authority isn't imposed from above; it's granted from below, through identification with the group the authority figure represents. This is engaged followership: people act in accordance with leaders who they perceive as representing "us." When the identification breaks---when the authority figure starts representing "them"---compliance collapses. The social map determines who gets to issue instructions, and it does so through identity, not hierarchy.