In both of the cases we have touched upon in this brief commentary, the deflationary approach developed by Heyes and colleagues sheds important light on how functionally specific social cognitive processes can be subserved at least in part by domain-general processes. On the other hand, we have also argued that the fruitfulness of this approach has been unnecessarily hampered by a contrastive conception of the relationship between domain-general and domain-specific processes. We have therefore proposed a complementary conception: the identification of domain-general processes that are engaged in instances of social perception can lead to specific new research questions about the domain-specific processes that are also engaged in such instances.