II. Pedia Sapiens: A Planetary Progeny Comes to Her/His Own Actual Factual Knowledge

2. Collective Local/ Global Brain Intelligences

Wheatley, Thalia. The Emerging Science of Interacting Minds. Perspectives on Psychological Science. November, 2023. In a special issue on The Psychology of Collectives, the Dartmouth College psychologist and director of its Consortium for Interacting Minds joins a welling chorus which quantifies and advocates this spiral moment which can, at last, appreciate and facilitate the value of common wisdom.

For over a century, psychology has focused on the mental processes of a single individuals, but humans rarely navigate the world in isolation. A person’s successful development, traits, dispositions, are due to family and many friends. Social interaction makes us who we are, how we think, and our behavior. Here we discuss issues that have limited a robust science of how minds engage, commune, and new approaches beginning to address these aspects. A deep understanding of the human mind requires studying the public contextual milieu within which it originates and proceeds. (Abstract)

In this article, we discuss prior research that notes the vital consequences of social interaction for individuals and collectives. We then address why the study of interaction itself—the meeting of minds that co-constitutes thought and behavior—has been empirically neglected despite its lifelong importance. Finally, we explain why it seems we are on the expansive cusp of a conceptual and methodological advance that will refocus the field on the importance of social interactions for the purpose of understanding the human mind. (1)

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