Shared Intentionality Research Articles

Shared Intentionality and Automatic Imitation: The case ofLa Ola

This article argues that such large-scale cases of crowd behavior as the Mexican Wave ( La Ola) constitute forms of shared intentionality which cannot be explained solely with the use of the standard intentionalistic ontology. It claims that such unique forms of collective intentionality require a hybrid explanatory lens in which an account of shared goals, intentions, and other propositional attitudes is combined with an account of the motor psychology of collective agents. The paper describes in detail the intentionalistic ontology of La Ola and discusses the conditions of cooperation it meets. The discussion allows the author to defend the view that large-scale collective intentionality can be based on automaticity to a significant degree: to properly understand such phenomena like La Ola, the idea of probabilistically interpreted decisions and propensities to act should give way to the automatic aspects of behavior. This paves the way for future studies in the philosophy of action to fully recognize the role of automatic performances at the level of collective actions just as they do for individual actions.

How animals collaborate: Underlying proximate mechanisms.

Collaboration or social interactions in which two or more individuals coordinate their behavior to produce outcomes from which both individuals benefit are common in nature. Individuals from many species hunt together, defend their territory, and form coalitions in intragroup competition. However, we still know very little about the proximate mechanisms underlying these behaviors. Recent theories of human cognitive evolution have emphasized the role collaboration may have played in the selection of socio-cognitive skills. It has been argued that the capacity to form shared goals and joint intentions with others, is what allows humans to collaborate so flexibly and efficiently. Although there is no evidence that nonhuman animals are capable of shared intentionality, there is conceivably a wide range of proximate mechanisms that support forms of, potentially flexible, collaboration in other species. We review the experimental literature with the aim of evaluating what we know about how other species achieve collaboration; with a particular focus on chimpanzees. We structure the review with a new categorization of collaborative behavior that focuses on whether individuals intentionally coordinate actions with others. We conclude that for a wider comparative perspective we need more data from other species but the findings so far suggest that chimpanzees, and possibly other great apes, are capable of understanding the causal role of a partner in collaboration. This article is categorized under: Cognitive Biology > Evolutionary Roots of Cognition Psychology > Comparative Psychology.

Shared Intentionality, joint commitment, and directed obligation.

Tomasello frequently refers to joint commitment, but does not fully characterize it. In earlier publications, I have offered a detailed account of joint commitment, tying it to a sense that the parties form a "we," and arguing that it grounds directed obligations and rights. Here I outline my understanding of joint commitment and its normative impact.

Shared intentionality shapes humans' technical know-how.

Osiurak and Reynaud argue that cumulative technological culture is made possible by a "non-social cognitive structure" (sect. 1, para. 1) and they offer an account that aims "to escape from the social dimension" (sect. 1, para. 2) of human cognition. We challenge their position by arguing that human technical rationality is unintelligible outside of our species' uniquely social form of life, which is defined by shared intentionality (Kern & Moll 2017, Philosophical Psychology30(3):319-37; Tomasello 2019a, Becoming human: A theory of ontogeny. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press).

How Do Brains Get on the Same Page

“Shared intentionality,” a distinctly human feature, refers to people's capacity to collaborate. The capacity to share intentionality, which develops

How children come to understand false beliefs: A shared intentionality account

To predict and explain the behavior of others, one must understand that their actions are determined not by reality but by their beliefs about reality. Classically, children come to understand beliefs, including false beliefs, at about 4-5 y of age, but recent studies using different response measures suggest that even infants (and apes!) have some skills as well. Resolving this discrepancy is not possible with current theories based on individual cognition. Instead, what is needed is an account recognizing that the key processes in constructing an understanding of belief are social and mental coordination with other persons and their (sometimes conflicting) perspectives. Engaging in such social and mental coordination involves species-unique skills and motivations of shared intentionality, especially as they are manifest in joint attention and linguistic communication, as well as sophisticated skills of executive function to coordinate the different perspectives involved. This shared intentionality account accords well with documented differences in the cognitive capacities of great apes and human children, and it explains why infants and apes pass some versions of false-belief tasks whereas only older children pass others.

Putting our heads together: interpersonal neural synchronization as a biological mechanism for shared intentionality.

Shared intentionality, or collaborative interactions in which individuals have a shared goal and must coordinate their efforts, is a core component of human interaction. However, the biological bases of shared intentionality and, specifically, the processes by which the brain adjusts to the sharing of common goals, remain largely unknown. Using functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), coordination of cerebral hemodynamic activation was found in subject pairs when completing a puzzle together in contrast to a condition in which subjects completed identical but individual puzzles (same intention without shared intentionality). Interpersonal neural coordination was also greater when completing a puzzle together compared to two control conditions including the observation of another pair completing the same puzzle task or watching a movie with a partner (shared experience). Further, permutation testing revealed that the time course of neural activation of one subject predicted that of their partner, but not that of others completing the identical puzzle in different partner sets. Results indicate unique brain-to-brain coupling specific to shared intentionality beyond what has been previously found by investigating the fundamentals of social exchange.

Organizational Context, Employer-Employee Shared Intentionality, and Well-Being Perceptions

The aim of this study is to investigate the relationship between well- being initiatives (WBI) and employees’ perceptions of WBI in different organizational contexts. We conducted a cross-context a...

Socially Extended Cognition and Shared Intentionality.

The paper looks at the intersection of extended cognition and social cognition. The central claim is that the mechanisms of shared intentionality can equally be considered as coupling mechanisms of cognitive extension into the social domain. This claim will be demonstrated by investigating a detailed example of cooperative action, and it will be argued that such cases imply that socially extended cognition is not only about cognitive vehicles, but that content must additionally be taken into account. It is finally outlined how social content externalism can in principle be grounded in socially extended cognition.

Viewing Others as Equals: the Non-cognitive Roots of Shared Intentionality

We propose two adjustments to the classic view of shared intentionality (our capacity to share mental states of various sorts) as based on conceptual-level cognitive skills. The first one takes into account that infants and young children display this capacity, but lack conceptual-level cognitive skills. The second one seeks to integrate cognitive and non-cognitive skills into that capacity. This second adjustment is motivated by two facts. First, there is an enormous difference between human infants and our closest living primate relatives with respect to the range and scale of goal sharing and cooperation. Second, recent evidence suggests that there are hardly any differences in their mental-state attribution capacities. We argue therefore that our distinctively human capacity for shared intentionality is due to the effect on our cognitive skills of a (probably inborn) practical attitude. Accordingly, we propose that cognitive and practical skills, working together, produce our capacity for shared intentionality, and review evidence suggesting that the practical skill in question consists in the ability to adopt an attitude of equality.

Individual differences in the intentionality bias and its association with cognitive empathy

Previous research indicates that we tend to over-attribute intention when interpreting the actions of others. This ‘intentionality bias’ is explained by a dual-process model of intention attribution (Rosset, 2008). However, it is currently unclear whether individual differences exist in the intentionality bias, and specifically whether cognitive and/or affective empathy skills are associated with hyper-intentionality. In the current study, we adopted Rosset's (2008) ambiguous sentence paradigm to test whether individual differences in the intentionality bias are associated with self-reported perspective taking, online simulation, emotion contagion, proximal responsivity and peripheral responsivity. Regression analyses revealed that cognitive empathy, but not affective empathy, significantly predicted the proportion of intentional judgements when participants were asked to interpret ambiguous sentences that were prototypically accidental. Moreover, greater perspective taking skills predicted a higher proportion of intentional over accidental judgements of ambiguous actions. The implications of these findings for understanding prosocial behaviour and ‘shared intentionality’ among humans are discussed.

The language of cooperation: shared intentionality drives variation in helping as a function of group membership.

While we know that the degree to which humans are able to cooperate is unrivalled by other species, the variation humans actually display in their cooperative behaviour has yet to be fully explained. This may be because research based on experimental game-theoretical studies neglects fundamental aspects of human sociality and psychology, namely social interaction and language. Using a new optimal foraging game loosely modelled on the prisoner's dilemma, the egg hunt, we categorized players as either in-group or out-group to each other and studied their spontaneous language usage while they made interactive, potentially cooperative decisions. Both shared group membership and the possibility to talk led to increased cooperation and overall success in the hunt. Notably, analysis of players' conversations showed that in-group members engaged more in shared intentionality, the human ability to both mentally represent and then adopt another's goal, whereas out-group members discussed individual goals more. Females also helped more and displayed more shared intentionality in discussions than males. Crucially, we show that shared intentionality was the mechanism driving the increase in helping between in-group players over out-group players at a cost to themselves. By studying spontaneous language during social interactions and isolating shared intentionality as the mechanism underlying successful cooperation, the current results point to a probable psychological source of the variation in cooperation humans display.

Reciprocidad cordial. Bases éticas de la cooperación

La ciencia económica preponderante descuidó el estudio de la cooperación humana. Esto se debe a que hay una contradicción entre ser seres racionales con propensión a maximizar el bienestar, por un lado, y la posibilidad de concretar objetivos de beneficiocomún e implementar procesos relacionales no coercitivos, por el otro lado. Sin embargo, la economía experimental se ha preocupado por hallar explicación a la actitud de reciprocidad que muestran los agentes en distintos juegos de estrategia, ya que posibilita concretar acciones colectivas en las que subyace una intencionalidad compartida que permite cumplir objetivos mutuamente dispuestos. Se busca mostrar cuándo y por qué los seres humanos empiezan a relacionarse con sus semejantes y cuáles el fundamento normativo que logra orientar estos comportamientos.

The Three Semiotic Lives of Domestic Cats: A Case Study on Animal Social Cognition

The social cognition of domestic cats (Felis catus) is a scarcely studied topic due to the reputation of the animal as individualistic. Nevertheless, cats are capable of cognitively demanding cooperative activities such as a communal nest-moving. The cognitive abilities of free-ranging cats are evaluated against the background of the shared intentionality hypothesis, proposed by a research group of Michael Tomasello. Although their comparative studies are carried out on chimpanzees, they are valuable as a source of conceptual work linking empirical cognitive studies with the philosophical accounts of joint agency. We critically analyze theoretical cognitive concepts interpreting the triadic interactions of great apes and the collective hunting among chimpanzees. Contrary to the shared intentionality hypothesis, it is argued that cats have cognitive abilities to share attention, truly cooperate and constitute shared meanings. Finally, we introduce the concept of the natural interaction ritual by Randall Collins and outline its significance for our case study about cats as well as for a general biosemiotic theory of the development of symbols.

Cultural Affordances: Scaffolding Local Worlds Through Shared Intentionality and Regimes of Attention.

In this paper we outline a framework for the study of the mechanisms involved in the engagement of human agents with cultural affordances. Our aim is to better understand how culture and context interact with human biology to shape human behavior, cognition, and experience. We attempt to integrate several related approaches in the study of the embodied, cognitive, and affective substrates of sociality and culture and the sociocultural scaffolding of experience. The integrative framework we propose bridges cognitive and social sciences to provide (i) an expanded concept of ‘affordance’ that extends to sociocultural forms of life, and (ii) a multilevel account of the socioculturally scaffolded forms of affordance learning and the transmission of affordances in patterned sociocultural practices and regimes of shared attention. This framework provides an account of how cultural content and normative practices are built on a foundation of contentless basic mental processes that acquire content through immersive participation of the agent in social practices that regulate joint attention and shared intentionality.

Informal distributed leadership in technology adoption

This study investigated the role of informal distributed leadership in dealing with the complexities of adopting technology innovation in Higher Education contexts. In the study, in-depth semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions were held with a group of informal leaders in a South African university. The findings suggest that informal distributed leadership works best in promoting technology adoption when there is a clear understanding of: (1) the locus of control of technology adopters; (2) power contestations between academics and students; (3) alignment of technology with pedagogical goals; and (4) shared intentionality between the core group of informal leaders. In practical terms, the study offers a middle-of-the-road approach to diffusion of technology innovation as an alternative to the ineffective top-down and individual innovative leader (bottom-up) approaches. For originality/novelty, the study introduces the distributed leadership theory into the technology adoption discourse.

Methodological consequences of weak embodied cognition and shared intentionality

Abstract Embodied approaches to cognition have been empirically successful both in developmental psychology and robotics. Shared intentionality has been similarly productive in developmental and comparative psychology. However, embodiment and shared intentionality both have a rich philosophical history. As a consequence, researchers who aim to benefit from the methodological advances of these literature must navigate through a variety of different usages, many of which rest on potentially contentious philosophies regarding the nature of mind. We attempt to identify renditions of embodiment and shared intentionality that can motivate research while making relatively modest assumptions. As we will see, such readings already exist in the embodied cognition literature. We find most uses of shared intentionality, however, to be unnecessarily strong theses that inevitably tie a researcher to contentious frameworks. We suggest a usage-based explication of shared intentionality that is far weaker, and may motivate research in the absence of such assumptions.

Joint Intentionality

AbstractAccording to the shared intentionality hypothesis proposed by Michael Tomasello, two cognitive upgrades – joint and collective intentionality, respectively – make human thinking unique. Joint intentionality, in particular, is a mindset supposed to account for our early, species-specific capacity to participate in collaborative activities involving two (or a few) agents. In order to elucidate such activities and their proximate cognitive-motivational mechanism, Tomasello draws on philosophical accounts of shared intentionality. I argue that his deference to such cognitively demanding accounts of shared intentional activities is problematic if his theoretical ambition is in part to show that and how early (prelinguistic and precultural) capacities for joint action contribute to the development of higher cognitive capacities.

Tension in the Natural History of Human Thinking

AbstractMichael Tomasello has greatly expanded our knowledge of human cognition and how it differs from that of other animals. In this commentary to his recent book A Natural History of Human Thinking, I first critique some of the presuppositions and arguments of his evolutionary story about how homo sapiens’ cognition emerged. For example, I question the strategy of relying on the modern chimpanzee as a model for our last shared ancestor, and I doubt the idea that what changed first over evolutionary time was hominin behavior, which then in turn brought about changes in cognition. In the second half of the commentary I aim to show that the author oscillates between an additive and a transformative account of human shared intentionality. I argue that shared intentionality shapes cognition in its entirety and therefore precludes the possibility that humans have the same, individual intentionality (as shown in, e.g. their instrumental reasoning) as other apes.

Emergence of Shared Intentionality Is Coupled to the Advance of Cumulative Culture.

There is evidence that the sharing of intentions was an important factor in the evolution of humans’ unique cognitive abilities. Here, for the first time, we formally model the coevolution of jointly intentional behavior and cumulative culture, showing that rapid techno-cultural advance goes hand in hand with the emergence of the ability to participate in jointly intentional behavior. Conversely, in the absence of opportunities for significant techno-cultural improvement, the ability to undertake jointly intentional behavior is selected against. Thus, we provide a unified mechanism for the suppression or emergence of shared intentions and collaborative behavior in humans, as well as a potential cause of inter-species diversity in the prevalence of such behavior.