English | ISBN: 1032639199 | 2025 | 512 pages | EPUB | 4 MB
Of all species, human beings are uniquely capable of coordinating on long-term, large-scale cooperative projects with unfamiliar and genetically unrelated others. According to the mindshaping hypothesis, this relies on mechanisms and practices like imitation, pedagogy, normative cognition, and narrative self-constitution, which shape us into expert coordinators, without requiring time consuming and epistemically fraught attempts to read each other's minds. Mindshaping has been applied to many areas of inquiry, including game theory, shared agency, communication, the ontogeny of human cognition, the dissemination of scientific knowledge in popular media, mental illness, and the influence of social media technologies.