Psychological research on the ‘We-mode’: Current perspectives

Abstract

The ‘we-mode’ is defined as an irreducibly collective mode that enables interacting agents to share minds by representing their contributions to a joint action as contributions to something that they are going to pursue together (Gallotti and Frith, 2013, Trends in Cognitive Science, 17, 160–165). This paper reviews the current empirical findings on joint actions upon which the concept ‘we-mode’ relies heavily. Previous investigations on joint actions have demonstrated that sharing task representations allows individuals to predict and monitor their own actions and those of their partners, as well as their combined action outcomes. It has also been shown that performing actions together allows individuals to spontaneously adopt their partner’s level-2 visual and visuospatial perspective. The implications of these findings for research on the we-mode are discussed.