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Virtually all appellate courts use groups of judges to decide cases. Accordingly, small group theory is a useful perspective for investigating appellate court decision making. In particular, scholarship about group cognition can help make sense of when we can expect judges to rely on legal (e.g., precedent) versus nonlegal (e.g., political preference) factors in the choices they make. In addition, research on the roles and status of group members in relationship to leadership and conformity can help us understand when certain formal (e.g., chief judge) and informal (e.g., freshman judge) roles are likely to structure judicial choice. More generally, placing appellate courts in a small group framework can aid in better understanding the quality of adjudication by focusing on how groups aggregate the expertise of individual group members to produce group outcomes.

My goal in this chapter is to show that Kirsh and Maglio’s (1994) distinction between pragmatic and epistemic action can be generalized from the level of individuals to that of groups. The concept of a collective epistemic action refers to ways in which groups actively change the structure of their social organization to improve their epistemic performance as collective agents. By emphasizing the interactions among people, rather than between people and their tools, I reconnect the “extended mind” thesis with complementary areas of social-scientific research in which groups are analyzed as the seats of action and cognition in their own right.

Recent developments in the study of human cognition suggest that, in the context of interacting to accomplish a task together, humans engage in a form of ‘distributed’ or ‘cooperative’ cognition that facilitates their work. A key feature of this type of shared cognition is the capacity for humans to be aware of themselves as members of the cooperating group, and as the need arises, they can also become aware of the group itself when it must be regulated due to some dysfunction. In an attempt to bring new insights to this feature of cooperative cognition, this chapter engages with Buddhist epistemological theories of ‘reflexive awareness’ presented by the Buddhist philosopher Dharmakīrti and his followers, and it points to crucial implications of the Dharmakīrtian notion of reflexivity that may be relevant to understanding the kind of reflexivity that sustains cooperative cognition.

This chapter provides an overview of the content of the present volume, beginning with some background assumptions about the importance of social groups and the influence of culture on group identity, group cognition, and group processes. The mutual relationship between culture and group process is emphasized. On the one hand, groups exist within a cultural context, wherein groups are defined and intragroup and intergroup behavior is regulated. And on the other hand, culture is a group product, an emergent property of the interdependent social exchange and mutual influence that constitutes group process. This bidirectional perspective provides a framework for reviewing the content of the remaining chapters in the book and for outlining an agenda for future research and theory in this domain.

This chapter examines cultural similarities and differences in beliefs about the nature of social groups, focusing beliefs that groups are grounded in underlying essences (essentialism) and that they are meaningful entities (entitativity). Evidence of cross-cultural, inter-ethnic, and urban-rural variations in the degree of essentialist thinking about groups, traits, and identities is presented. The small quantity of research on cultural differences in the content, structure and attitudinal implications of essentialist social thinking is also reviewed. Research on entitativity also indicates that people from East Asian backgrounds tend to see social groups as more entity-like than Westerners, a tendency that may reflect a focus on dynamic coherence based on goals and intra-group relationships. Implications and future research directions are discussed.

This chapter steps back from the important psychological work on collaborative remembering at the heart of the present volume to take up some broader questions about the place of memory in Western cultural thought, both historically and in contemporary society, offering the kind of integrative and reflective perspective for which philosophy is often known. In particular, the text aims to shed some light on the relationship between collaborative memory and the other two topics in this title—group-level cognizing and individuals—beginning with the relationship between collective intentionality and collaborative remembering, and concluding with some brief comments on the politics of collaborative remembering by drawing on recent work that has been undertaken with eugenics survivors in Canada.

Group jazz improvisation at the highest levels can achieve a kind of cooperative creativity that rises above the sum total of the contributions of the individuals. This phenomenon is widely recognized, but has resisted description beyond metaphors that refer to ‘special chemistry’ and the like. Some recent work in the philosophy of social action, on collective intention and group cognition, and on what has been helpfully called a ‘plural subject’, is brought together in this chapter with a close listening to the Stan Getz Quartet’s performance of the classic standard ‘On Green Dolphin Street’. As with discussions of group action in recent philosophical writings, here it emerges that qualities of the improvised performance are not reducible to individuated intentional content, and the notion of the plural subject provides both an analysis of it and the language for it.

Chapter 10 provides a summary of the argument of the book. It elaborates some of the benefits of Literalism, such as less conceptual confusion and an expanded range of entities for research that might illuminate human cognition. It motivates distinguishing the questions of whether something has a cognitive capacity from whether it is intuitively like us. It provides a conceptual foundation for the social sciences appropriate for the increasing role of modeling in these sciences. It also promotes convergence in terms of the roles of internal and external factors in explaining both human and nonhuman behavior. Finally, it sketches some of the areas of new research that it supports, including group cognition and artificial intelligence.