Should social interactions be explained by individual cognitive capacities? - or conversely, can these capacities be explained by social interactions? In order to answer this question we adopt a pragmatic perspective for which the cognitive activity cannot be understood as detached from the social milieu, which precedes the relations which it makes possible. In addition, if one takes the view that inter-individual interactions participate in the constitution of phenomena of social cognition, one must provide explanatory schemes making it possible to account for abilities such as the recognition of other subjects, the perception of their intentions or the imitation of their facial expressions, rather than presupposing them as given from the start. We contribute here to the search for such schemes by proposing a minimalist experimental paradigm in which one can observe the genesis or the functioning of such abilities. These observational situations, which are extremely simple, should then enable a precise discussion of the mechanisms at work by proposing a way of disentangling what explains what in the relation between individual abilities and social dynamics. In the framework of an enactive approach we will then be able to demonstrate the role of the body-object in the collective organisation of interactions and in the reconfiguration of individual structures.