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It traces key philosophical accounts of shared cooperative activities and collective intentionality, then explains how joint agencies form via shared goals, common ground, coordinated roles, joint attention, and cooperative communication. It also addresses collective agencies through cultural conventions, norm enforcement, and institutional roles, and reviews controversies about whether great apes show comparable shared intentionality.",{"@graph":69,"@context":122},[70,84,105],{"@type":71,"itemListElement":72},"BreadcrumbList",[73,77,79,82],{"item":74,"name":75,"@type":76,"position":8},"https://docshare.wps.com","Home","ListItem",{"item":78,"name":9,"@type":76,"position":14},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/",{"item":80,"name":40,"@type":76,"position":81},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/research-report/",3,{"item":83,"name":65,"@type":76,"position":19},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/shared-intentionality-overview/638734/",{"url":83,"name":65,"@type":85,"image":86,"author":91,"headline":65,"publisher":94,"fileFormat":97,"inLanguage":63,"description":67,"dateModified":98,"datePublished":99,"encodingFormat":97,"isAccessibleForFree":100,"interactionStatistic":101},"DigitalDocument",{"url":87,"@type":88,"width":89,"height":90},"https://docshare.wps.com/thumbnails/shared-intentionality-overview/638734.png","ImageObject",300,407,{"name":92,"@type":93},"Mia  ","Person",{"url":74,"name":95,"@type":96},"DocShare","Organization","application/pdf","2026-11-04","2026-10-22",true,{"@type":102,"interactionType":103,"userInteractionCount":44},"InteractionCounter",{"@type":104},"ViewAction",{"@type":106,"mainEntity":107},"FAQPage",[108,114,118],{"name":109,"@type":110,"acceptedAnswer":111},"What makes human collaborative behavior different in this article?","Question",{"text":112,"@type":113},"The article argues that humans’ “we” operations have special properties, including perspective-based thinking, normative and moral regulation of social interactions, and complex cultural structuring through conventions, norms, and institutions.","Answer",{"name":115,"@type":110,"acceptedAnswer":116},"How does a joint agency with a joint goal form?",{"text":117,"@type":113},"Participants must share the same goal in common ground, coordinate their individual roles, and use joint attention to goal-relevant things, often through cooperative communication to support shared decision-making.",{"name":119,"@type":110,"acceptedAnswer":120},"What controversies does the article raise about shared intentionality in other primates?",{"text":121,"@type":113},"Comparative studies have claimed shared agency is unique to humans, but other researchers argue that great apes may also support cultures, joint/collective agency, commitments, joint attention, conventions, and cooperative communication—raising questions about why apes have not produced human-like cultural artifacts.","https://schema.org",{"og:url":83,"og:type":124,"og:title":65,"og:site_name":95,"og:description":67},"article",{"robots":126,"canonical":83},"index,follow",{"doc_id":128,"site_id":62},638734,1792734650,{"code":4,"msg":5,"data":131},{"doc_id":128,"user_id":132,"nickname":92,"user_avatar":133,"doc_module":4,"category_id":39,"category_name":40,"doc_title":65,"doc_description":67,"doc_content":134,"file_id":135,"file_url":136,"file_type":137,"file_size":138,"view_count":44,"is_deleted":4,"is_public":8,"is_downloadable":8,"audit_status":8,"page_count":24,"language":139,"language_code":63,"site_id":62,"html_lang":63,"table_of_contents":140,"faqs":141,"seo_title":142,"seo_description":67,"update_tm":143,"read_time":144},687207024478,"https://ap-avatar.wpscdn.com/davatar_a8503ba1806abce46bf441b54a3ca4cd","MIT Press • Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science  \nShared Intentionality  \nMichael Tomasello1,2  \n1Duke University, 2Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology  \nMIT Press  \nPublished on: May 27, 2025  \nURL: [https://oecs.mit.edu/pub/sep9e3c2](https://oecs.mit.edu/pub/sep9e3c2)  \nLicense: Creative Commons Attribution 4 .0 International License (CC-BY 4 .0)  \nHumans do many things together collaboratively as joint agents or in groups as collective agents. It turns out that these ways of operating together as a “we” have a number of special properties as compared with the cooperative interactions of other animal species. Most important are humans’ special ways of thinking in terms of perspectives, their special ways of regulating social interactions normatively and morally, and the special ways that their cultural groups structure everything via conventions, norms, and institutions that ratchet up in complexity over historical time.  \nHistory  \nBeginning in the 1990s, the philosopher of action Michael Bratman (1992, 2014) identified what he called shared cooperative activities and outlined some of the unique psychological processes at work when two people paint a house together or cook a meal together collaboratively. The philosopher of intentionality John Searle (1995, 2010) identified what he called collective intentionality and outlined some of the unique psychological processes at work when groups of people collectively recognize a comrade as a president or apiece of paper as money.  \nIn the early 2000s, Tomasello and Rakoczy (2003) and Tomasello et al. (2005) investigated how these processes of shared intentionality emerged in human evolution and how they emerge in human ontogeny [see Cognitive Development] . Tomasello (2014, 2016, 2019) distinguished between joint intentionality, involving individuals collaborating with one another, and collective intentionality, involving individuals interacting within a cultural group structured by cultural conventions, norms, and institutions. The proposal is that these processes are unique to humans—because at some point in human evolution individuals became interdependent with one another for survival—and they are responsible for humans’ unique forms of cooperation and cultural organization. Tomasello (2022, 2024) argued that the broadest perspective on these phenomena is in terms of human agency: humans (and only humans) form joint agencies and collective agencies.  \nCore concepts  \nTo form a joint agency with a joint goal, each participant must have the goal that they act together, and they must also know together in common ground that they both share this goal. Each partner has their own individual role in the joint agency that they must coordinate with their partner ’s role. Working together toward a joint goal requires joint attention to things relevant to the joint goal, with each partner having their own individual perspective. In the ideal case, participants engage in cooperative communication (acts aimed at informing the partner of things helpful to their role) to facilitate a joint decision. Participants may be tempted to opt out of the joint agency and so may begin by making a joint commitment (A: “Want to X?”; B: “Sure”), which entitles each of them to rebuke the other normatively for not playing their role in the ideal way or for not  \nsharing the spoils of the joint activity in a manner fair to both (“You should/should not X”; Gilbert, 2003, 2014) .  \nHuman groups may form collective agencies—prototypically cultural groups—with collective goals based in collective (or cultural) common ground. To facilitate coordination among in-group strangers, groups develop conventions—including communicative (linguistic) conventions—to which individuals simply conform. To become a full-fledged member of a cultural group, individuals join into a collective commitment to the social norms of the group, which obligates them not only to conform but to engage in norm enforcement to","cbCaigwHFild8j88","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaigwHFild8j88","pdf",107354,"English","# History\n# Core concepts\n# Questions, controversies, and new developments","[{\"question\":\"What makes human collaborative behavior different in this article?\",\"answer\":\"The article argues that humans’ “we” operations have special properties, including perspective-based thinking, normative and moral regulation of social interactions, and complex cultural structuring through conventions, norms, and institutions.\"},{\"question\":\"How does a joint agency with a joint goal form?\",\"answer\":\"Participants must share the same goal in common ground, coordinate their individual roles, and use joint attention to goal-relevant things, often through cooperative communication to support shared decision-making.\"},{\"question\":\"What controversies does the article raise about shared intentionality in other primates?\",\"answer\":\"Comparative studies have claimed shared agency is unique to humans, but other researchers argue that great apes may also support cultures, joint/collective agency, commitments, joint attention, conventions, and cooperative communication—raising questions about why apes have not produced human-like cultural artifacts.\"}]","Shared Intentionality - Overview | PDF",1792697759,13]