Social Behaviour and Collective Minds
Not Just Interactions — Collective Cognition
We tend to see social behaviour as something that occurs between individuals—negotiation, cooperation, conflict. But from a biogenic perspective, social life isn’t just about relationships. It’s cognitive. Groups don’t just interact. They think. They don’t just gather people. They build minds.
This chapter explores social behaviour as a distributed intelligence system—one that self-produces meaning, self-organises structure, and self-corrects through emotion, ritual, feedback, and adaptation. What we call "society" is not just a background condition for minds. It creates them.
From Brain to Groupmind
Imagine a crowd gathering in a plaza as music kicks off. People come together, dance, exchange looks, share feelings. For a moment, the crowd acts like a single organism — coordinated, responsive, alive. This isn’t just a metaphor. It’s emergence.
Just as neurons form dynamic networks that create a conscious mind, human beings build patterned social networks that generate collective cognition. These are not fixed or intentionally designed — they are emergent systems. They demonstrate memory, feedback, and intention.
Groupminds are real. They’re not magic. They result from individual self-organising systems (people) connecting in ways that boost coordination, synchrony, and collective purpose.
The Loop: From Individual to Collective and Back Again
This is not a one-way process. Individuals shape groups, but groups also shape individuals.
People develop norms, language, and culture.
Culture shapes thought, emotion, and identity.
We learn to think through the tools society provides us — language, stories, rituals. We take part in systems we didn’t create, but those systems develop through our involvement. It’s a recursive loop: mind becomes culture; culture becomes mind.
From a biogenic perspective, this loop is not noise — it’s structure. It supports regulation, coordination, and adaptation across different levels. What helps an individual stay coherent also helps a society remain functional. And vice versa.
Distributed Cognition in Action
Group behaviour can show the hallmarks of cognition:
Perception: A protest crowd senses shifts in mood and pressure.
Memory: A culture remembers through rituals, archives, and myths.
Attention: Social media directs collective focus in real time.
Emotion: Shared grief, outrage, or joy moves through populations like neural signals.
Even things like gossip, voting, or trends act like cognition: information is sensed, evaluated, and acted upon across a network. No single individual has full control, yet the system functions in purposeful ways.
This is cognition, just not inside a skull.
Social Systems as Self-Producing Minds
When seen through the Biogenic Triad, social minds function just like biological ones:
Self-Production (SP): Groups generate language, norms, rituals, and institutions — mechanisms that continuously produce and sustain shared meaning.
Self-Organisation (SO): Hierarchies, roles, and rituals develop naturally without central planning.
Self-Correction (SC): Feedback loops such as gossip, law, protest, and reform control deviation and promote renewal.
These systems function at every level — families, teams, cities, platforms, and even global networks. In the digital age, they’re integrating with machines.
The Rise of Hybrid Collective Minds
Social cognition is no longer confined to people. Algorithms now participate:
Recommender systems shape attention and memory.
AI agents modulate emotion and enforce norms.
Platforms like TikTok and X act as semi-conscious ecosystems.
These aren’t artificial minds in the sci-fi sense. But they do process information, generate feedback, and influence identity. We are entering a new type of cognitive ecology — one where biological, digital, and symbolic agents co-create distributed minds.
These hybrid minds will require new ways of receiving feedback. Biological systems developed shame, emotion, and justice to manage groups. What mechanisms will perform that role in digital society?
Healing as Ecological Repair
If minds are embedded in networks, then mental health isn’t just personal. It’s ecological. Healing one person can ripple through a group. Collective dysfunction can echo in individual bodies. Every intervention is systemic.
Therapy extends beyond fixing individual minds. It becomes a network-level adjustment within a living mesh. Social design evolves into psychological hygiene. Justice transforms into a feedback loop.
We are not isolated individuals. We are participants in evolving systems. And those systems — like any mind — require coherence, correction, and care.