GROUP MINDS IN ANCIENT NARRATIVE
State-of-the-art and objectives
Social cognition is a crucial category not only of life but of narrative as well. We read stories about people who engage in social interactions, act on shared emotions and thoughts, and view themselves as part of specific groups. But how does narrative representation of collective consciousness serve as a mode of coming to grips with social and distributed cognition in everyday life? The overall objective of the GROUPMINDS project is to build a bridge between narrative theory and the phenomenological experience of cognition as socially extended and distributed among a set of individuals, in order to give new answers as to the question of narrative’s function in humans’ understanding of the social world.
Philosophers, psychologists, and cognitive scientists have challenged the view that cognitive processes like thinking or planning are strictly brain- and body-bound affairs. They suggested that they can be socially extended and shared by multiple agents (e.g. McNeese et al. 2021a; 2021b; 2021c). A rapidly growing body of work has been done on phenomena such as joint intention, shared episodic memories, group emotions, empathy, and the capacity of humans for sharing and interchanging knowledge and understanding—what is known as ‘intersubjectivity’ (e.g. Meltzoff 2007; Moll et al. 2021).
“Dedication of a new Vestal Virgin”, oil on canvas, painted by Alessandro Marchesini; Italy, 18th AD; The State Hermitage Museum (source: The State Hermitage Museum – Brenzoni, Raffaello, Dizionario di arttisti veneti, Firenze, 1972).
Recent research, moreover, has focused on shared cognition and the interactive processes among individual agents, the nature of the “We” and the position of the “I” in it (e.g. Zahavi 2014; Honneth 2018;). Closely relevant are arguments about the existence of a “group person” (Rovane 2012) and the notion of group as a “We-subject” whose participating individuals share intentionality (Carr 1986). It has actually been suggested that groups may have minds and (moral) agency in much the same way that individuals do (e.g. Tollefsen 2015).
Narrative plays a crucial role in determining social cognition. Not only consciousness has a narrative character—we construct our experience of human affairs by making stories and then we use these stories as a mental tool for constructing our reality—but also the experiential structures of emotions, which normally include a person, act, event, and intention, are closely related to recurrent narrative patterns. Complex plots and stories are usually broken down into thought- and emotion-scripts in everyday social interaction as ways of structuring self- and other-understanding (e.g. Russell 2003; Snaevarr 2010). Narratives embed and embody the cognitive scripts of their time and society, and they also constitute cognitive scripts themselves, which influence, refine, and extend the cognitive repertoires and capacities of their audiences. Much thought has been paid to the way in which we mentally represent events in narrative form—what is known as “narrative thinking”—during our responses to past and future events in everyday life (e.g. Goldie 2012) as well as the understanding of narrative as enactive cognition, namely an intersubjective process of sense-making between a teller and a reader. These ideas are in keeping with a narrative approach to social cognition and other-understanding. According to this approach, it is not necessary that an individual should have an innate ability to attribute mind states to other people (i.e. a Theory of Mind (ToM)), but exposure to stories during formative years is enough to teach children this ability.
Despite all this important work that has been done on the nature and processes of social cognition as well as the narrative’s effects on it, there has been no comprehensive approach that combines narrative theory on collective minds with the findings of cognitive scientists and philosophers of mind. It is this research gap that GROUPMINDS aims to fill by seeking to explore the complex relationship between the representation of group cognition in narratives and the cognitive responses that are evoked in the readers of such narratives as ways of making sense of the storyworld and the social world around them.
GROUPMINDS has the following objectives:
- To examine how group mind is narrativised.
- To examine what kinds of intermental relations are at play in different narratives.
- To consider by which narrative means the readers are drawn to understand different aspects of social and team cognition, and thus illuminate what kinds of cognitive responses are elicited in them.
- To explore how and to what extent thinking about narrative minds feeds into thinking about human minds, cognitive interaction, and intersubjectivity in the real world.
Methodology
(1) Structuralist Narratology
(as espoused by multiple theorists, see The Living Handbook of Narratology, available in open access, for detailed updated bibliography), which focuses on a systematic analysis of the following categories of narrative:
i. Narrator and narratees (the agent who tells the story and the people to whom the story is addressed).
ii. Focalisation (the way in which a character sees, interprets, evaluates, and understands the story).
iii. Speech (the verbal narrative of a narrator or a character, its characteristics and function(s)).
iv. Character/Characterisation (the way in which a narrative character is constructed).
v. Time (the temporal sequence of the different events recounted and the relationships developed between them).
vi. Space (the setting of the action of the story, and the various objects, locations, and descriptions included).
vii. Plot (the narrative structure of events and the way in which narrative action moves forward).
“A Roman Feast”, oil on canvas, painted by Roberto Bompiani; Italy, 19th AD; Paul Getty Museum (source: Paul Getty Museum - Sotheby, Parke-Bernet, Important European & American 19th Century Paintings, Los Angeles, 1972).
(2) Cognitivist Approaches to Narrative
Structuralist narratology will be complemented by recent developments in cognitive narratology. Like other postclassical narrative studies, cognitive narratology engages in trans-generic approaches, where narratological concepts are applied in genres other than the traditionally accepted novel. Cognitive narratology considers the mind and consciousness as the defining features of narratives (e.g. Fludernik 1996; Herman 2009), and examines the mental processes that readers (and authors) use in their understanding and creation of narrative texts. It mainly focuses on the role of narrative as a way of thinking in real life, the interaction between the mind of the reader and the narrative, and the interaction of the minds of characters in the storyworld.
Especially important for the purposes of this project are recent cognitive approaches to character construction in narratives (e.g. Jannidis 2004; Zunshine 2006; Cave 2016) which focus on the mental lives of characters in stories and the cognitive structures, ‘frames’, and inferential mechanisms involved in the reader’s interpretation of the characters. Closely relevant are recent discussions of the construction of the image of the narrator through the cognitive psychological theory of attribution, which seeks to infer the dispositions and attitudes of the narrating agent from behaviour, as well as recent studies of “plural subjects (and minds)” in “we” narratives (e.g. Bekhta 2020). Of particular significance is also Palmer’s work (esp. 2004; 2010) on fictional social minds and the idea of “intermentality”, namely the connection and relation between two or more minds in a narrative, which results in the formation of a collective that has a single consciousness. Although since Palmer’s publications a good deal of illuminating work has been done on the depiction and function of collective consciousness in narrative texts, a poetics of the collective in narrative is still missing. Fludernik 2017 points to the desirability of such a poetics. GROUPMINDS builds on this observation and aims to fill this gap.
(3) Phenomenology & Cognitive Science
Alongside narratological theory, our methodological framework will be complemented by recent insights drawn from the phenomenological tradition (focusing especially on the experiential, embodied, and affective aspects of the mind) and contemporary theoretical and empirical research on social cognition and the role of narrative in its construction. Those recent improvements provide significant pathways to understand the emotions, consciousness, agency, intentionality, and (moral) responsibility of groups, and to capture the cognitive mechanisms that readers apply when they infer the minds of other people, including groups, both during real-life social exchange and during story reading. Accordingly, they permit us to build a bridge between the construction of mental representations of groups in narrative and the human’s cognitive processing in everyday social life. The former are not simply a feature of the text, but a result of the interaction between textual structures and the reader activating them. Subsequently, this activation influences the reader’s social-cognitive operations during everyday social interaction and may itself become the subject of another narration, i.e. another story, which, in turn, affects the experience of human affairs.
“Cicerone denuncia Catilina”, fresco, produced by Cesare Maccari; Rome, 1880 AD; Palazzo Madama (source: G. De Sanctis, “Gli affreschi di C. Maccari nella Sala del Senato”, Nuova Antologia, CVI, Roma, 1889).
If one looks at the ancient world, one will find that the culture of Greek and Roman antiquity is rich in sites and practices of social interaction and collective experience. Greek antiquity has been the first society to embrace the concept of democracy (however partial and imperfect it may have been according to our standards), which gave a certain edge to questions regarding groups. Moreover, certain societal or political concepts, such as societas, universitas, corporatio, and collegium that formed in antiquity remained influential throughout European history. GROUPMINDS is a timely contribution to the rapidly evolving field of cognitive classics.
Attic red-figured kylix attributed to the Foundry Painter depicting a scene of boxers and pancratiasts training; excavated in Vulci; 490-480 BC; British Museum; (source: British Museum - CVA British Museum 9 / Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum: Great Britain 17, British Museum 9 (48)).
The project’s driving research hypothesis is that ancient narrative thematises processes of group cognition in ways hitherto undetected, and that a detailed analysis of these processes offers new insights over the way narrative cognitively affects both reading experience and real-life experience of intersubjectivity. In order to be able to test this hypothesis, the project is divided into several work packages that include detailed examinations of group cognition in specific genres: ancient historiography (including biography), epic, Roman oratory, and the Greek novel. A further work package tackles theoretical reflections on intersubjectivity in ancient philosophical texts. This complementarity between wide scope/theory and detailed studies of specific genres is highly advisable: while the proposed genre studies explore the construction of forms and notions of the group mind, revealing by comparison the texts’ similarities and differences as well as their mind-evoking techniques, the theoretical research offers the distinctive ideological framework for investigations of intersubjective cognition in antiquity. The different work packages are tightly entwined with each other, thus maximising cross-fertilisation and achieving together a comprehensive study of the ancient group mind.
CHRYSANTHOS S. CHRYSANTHOU
Assistant Professor of Ancient Greek
& PI of GROUPMINDS
Cited Works
Bekhta, N. (ed.) (2020). “We-Narratives and We-Discourses across Genres”, Special issue Style 54.1.
Carr, D. (1986). “Cogitamus Ergo Sumus: The Intentionality of the First-Person Plural”, The Monist 69: 521–533.
Cave, T. (2016). Thinking with Literature: Towards a Cognitive Criticism (Oxford).
Fludernik, M. (1996). Towards a ‘natural’ Narratology (London).
Fludernik, M. (2017). “The Many in Action and Thought: Towards a Poetics of the Collective in Narrative”, Narrative 25: 139–163.
Goldie, P. (2012). The Mess Inside. Narrative, Emotion, and the Mind.
Herman, D. (2009). Basic Elements of Narrative (Oxford).
Honneth, A. (2018). Anerkennung: Eine europäische Ideengeschichte (Berlin).
Jannidis, F. (2004). Figur und Person: Beitrag zu einer historischen Narratologie (Berlin).
McNeese, M., Salas, E. & Endsley, M. (eds.) (2021a). Foundations and Theoretical Perspectives of Distributed Team Cognition (London).
McNeese, M., Salas, E. & Endsley, M. (eds.) (2021b). Fields of Practice and Applied Solutions within Distributed Team Cognition (London).
McNeese, M., Salas, E. & Endsley, M. (eds.) (2021c). Contemporary Research. Models, Methodologies, and Measures in Distributed Team Cognition (London).
Meltzoff, A. (2007). “‘Like Me’: A Foundation for Social Cognition”, Developmental Science 10: 126–134.
Moll, H., Pueschel, E., Ni Q. & Little A. (2021). “Sharing Experiences in Infancy: From Primary Intersubjectivity to Shared Intentionality”, Frontiers in Psychology 12: 1– 13.
Palmer, A. (2004). Fictional Minds (Lincoln).
Palmer, A. (2010). Social Minds in the Novel (Columbus).
Rovane, C. (2012). “Does Rationality Enforce Identity?’, in A. Coliva (ed.), The Self and Self-Knowledge (Oxford): 17–38.
Russell, J. (2003). “Core Affect and the Psychological Construction of Emotion”, Psychological Review 110: 145–172.
Snaevarr, S. (2010). Metaphors, Narratives, Emotions: Their Interplay and Impact (Amsterdam).
Tollefsen, D. (2015). Groups as Agents (Cambridge).
Zahavi, D. (2014). Self and Other: Exploring Subjectivity, Empathy, and Shame (Oxford).
Zunshine, L. (2006). Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (Columbus, OH).
