Towards a shared framework of shared psychological processes in social coordination

Sharing psychological processes such as attention, intentions and emotions plays a vital role in the phenomenology, ontogeny and phylogeny of social coordination and has therefore been widely studied. Yet, discussions about how to characterize this phenomenon often remain within the boundaries of individual fields. Consequently, there is much inconsistency in how this phenomenon is conceptualized and operationalized across fields, making it difficult to assess the value of empirical work on shared psychological processes emerging in different areas. In an attempt to facilitate cross-discipline consistency we propose a novel framework of shared psychological processes, consisting of five principles. First, sharing psychological processes is construed as a cognitive capacity. Second, sharing psychological processes has intrapersonal and interactive consequences. Third, for a psychological process to be shared the overlap between individuals has to be deemed sufficient in the light of a functional criterion of shared psychological processes. Fourth, sharing psychological processes can take different forms depending on whether the recursive structure of the social information being processed allows us to construe the emerging social relationship in terms of physically causal (inter)dependency, psychological dependency, psychological interdependency, or interpersonality. Fifth, sharing psychological processes can take different forms depending on whether it is based on inferences about occurrent psychological processes in others, or assumptions about stable, latent psychological processes in others. These latter two principles culminate into a novel shared psychology typology, describing different forms of sharing in joint action (i.e. conjugate, co-experienced, shared, and joint) and disjoint social coordination (i.e. common, mutual, grounded and concordant).Author note: The first version of the manuscript is the original MAP, defended on the 25th of April 2019. This version is a paper that has been submitted to Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Psychological Review, and Perspectives on Psychological Science (all in 2020).