The Social Mind: Origins of Collective Reasoning

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TITLE: The Social Mind: Origins of Collective Reasoning


TIME and DATE: University of Oslo, Centre for the Study of Mind in Nature (CSMN), Aug. 29-30 2014

Standard decision theory predicts that individuals will (and ought to) defect in Prisoner's Dilemma situations. Yet, individuals often cooperate in such cases, and it sometimes appears rational for them to do so. Recently, a new approach has emerged that attempts to explain these results within a decision theoretic framework. According to proponents of the team reasoning approach, groups of individuals may count as agents.  On this view, instead of maximizing their own preferences, individuals will maximize the preferences of a group with which they identify. This raises a number of questions: What is the cognitive machinery that allows for such team reasoning? Does it require meta-representational capacities that go beyond the capacities implicated in individual decision-making? What makes individuals take the perspective of the group?



Recent work on social perspective taking in developmental psychology, and philosophy of mind and cognitive science appears relevant to these questions. Such work has called into question the assumption that we are individuals first and only secondarily members of groups or teams. On an interpretation that is rapidly gaining popularity certain findings from childhood development suggest that at least our explicit sense of self co-develops with our sense of others and the "we" of the group of which we are a part. This raises further questions: Does such work show that the cooperative tendencies modeled by the team reasoning framework are a fairly primitive part of human psychology? Do individuals ever face a decision to think as a group? Is team reasoning cognitively "light", at least as light as individual reasoning? Can empirical work on the development of the sense of self and others shed light on the conditions in which we think as a team?



In order to make progress on the questions sketched above, this workshop attempts to bring into contact researchers interested in team reasoning approaches to human decision making with researchers interested in the development of group identification, social perspective taking, and the sense of self and other.