This article introduces an idea called collective meta-attention, which treats the group’s awareness as an information signal that individuals can attend to. That signal promises a lean cognitive strategy: rather than tracking each person’s inner state, people monitor how attention is distributed across a group. If this works, it could explain why crowds converge on the same judgment, why teams form shared emotions, and why movements gain traction without perfect communication.
If you care about learning environments, inclusive decision-making, or how technology shapes public opinion, the proposal points to practical ways to design for shared understanding. Follow the full article to see how collective meta-attention might reshape tools and spaces that help people form reliable, inclusive shared minds.
Abstract
I argue that the emerging field of collective cognition lacks consensus as to how a psychological state can be shared. Whereas much is known about the basic sensorimotor and cognitive mechanisms of social alignment, representations of “sharedness” at the meta-cognitive level remain unclear. One reason for this lack of clarity is the genuine difficulties involved in attending to the attention of multiple individual minds. As an alternative, I argue that individuals can use collective meta-attention, or attention to the attention of collective minds, as a cognitively frugal and epistemically robust way to track the presence of a shared experience. I also discuss the implications of the proposal for other shared mental states such as shared emotions, attitudes, beliefs, and goals.
