Thinking Collaboratively

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Since the cognitive revolution, psychologists have developed formal theories of cognition by thinking of the mind as a computer. This metaphor, however, is typically applied to individual minds. Humans rarely think in isolation. We are curiously dependent on culturally transmitted skills and knowledge, and we excel at collaborating with others. In this talk, Vélez will propose that—rather than studying the human mind as an isolated computer—we can instead imagine each mind within a collaboration as a node in a distributed system. Vélez will present two lines of work, which each provide a complementary view of how humans think together. The first line of work takes stock of the basic psychological processes that enable collaboration. Vélez will present evidence that the human capacity to understand other minds—or mentalizing—enables us to navigate key challenges of collaboration, including effectively communicating with collaborators and building collaborative teams. The second line of work examines how teams adapt their structure to the constraints of their environment and task. Vélez will present an observational study of One Hour One Life, a multiplayer online game where players collaborate to build technologically advanced cities from scratch. Together, these projects suggest that human collaboration is powered not only by our ability to understand the social world, but also by our ability to actively reshape the social world by forming teams. Vélez will conclude by proposing a theoretical framework to study how teams distribute tasks, information, and decisions over many minds.

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