Shared intentionality

Shared intentionality is a concept in psychology that describes the human capacity to engage with the psychological states of others. According to conventional wisdom in cognitive sciences, shared intentionality supports the development of everything from cooperative interactions and knowledge assimilation to moral identity and cultural evolution that provides building societies, being a pre-requisite of social reality formation.^[1]

Knowledge about shared intentionality has been developing since the last century's end. This psychological construct was introduced in the 1980s with a straightforward definition of sharing psychological states among participants without attributing to age when it begins.^[2][3][4] The development of knowledge on mother-child interactions has revealed additional attributes about appearing shared intentionality; it showed this capacity enables one-year-olds to study environment.^{[5][clarification needed]} Later, Tomasello et al. specified that, even at birth, infants grasp shared intentionality with caregivers – this ability to share psychological states with others emerges immediately after birth.^[6] Tomasello hypothesized gradually increasing social bonds between children and caregivers through the essential motive force of shared intentionality beginning from emotion sharing from birth.^[7]

In 2022, Michael Tomasello received the David Rumelhart Prize 2022 in the Cognitive Science Society as an award for his insights into cognition evolution and, specifically, the knowledge development about a contribution of shared intentionality to cognition and social reality formation.^[1]

The concept is slightly close to collective intentionality. The philosophical notion of collective intentionality defines the capability of collectives to form co-intentions when individuals become jointly directed at objects, matters of fact, states of affairs, goals, or values. This co-intention occurs when two or more individuals undertake an aware task together. The attribute of the collective intentionality is defined in the object's awareness of a common intention, in the conscious power of minds to be jointly directed at a goal. It is thought that collective intentionality only implies aware intentions–the causal antecedents of action. Therefore, only three or four years old, after years of continuous interaction with other persons, children can develop an ability for collective intentionality, which acts as the comprehension of cultural institutions based on collective beliefs and practices.^[8] In contrast, the psychological construct of shared intentionality describes unaware processes during social learning at the onset of life, when organisms in the simple reflexes substage of the sensorimotor stage of cognitive development do not possess abstract thinking.^[9] This difference between the two concepts implies the possibility of two different neurophysiological processes underlying their appearance.

In recent years, the psychological construct of shared intentionality is being explored from different perspectives by studying: e.g., the cognitive processes involved in creating and sustaining cooperative group activity,^[10] collaborative neuronal activity in inter-brain neuroscience studies,^{[11][12][13][14][15][16]} and group performance in psychophysiological studies.^{[17][18][19][20][21]} However, the nature of the interaction in shared intentionality is unclear, since it occurs even in infants, organisms at the simple reflexes stage of development.^[22]