How We Share, Meta‐Cognitively

Abstract I argue that the emerging field of collective cognition lacks consensus as to how a psychological state can be shared. Whereas much is known about the basic sensorimotor and cognitive mechanisms of social alignment, representations of “sharedness” at the meta‐cognitive level remain unclear. One reason for this lack of clarity is the genuine difficulties involved in attending to the attention of multiple individual minds. As an alternative, I argue that individuals can use collective meta‐attention, or attention to the attention of collective minds, as a cognitively frugal and epistemically robust way to track the presence of a shared experience. I also discuss the implications of the proposal for other shared mental states such as shared emotions, attitudes, beliefs, and goals.