A social host in the machine? The case of group attention

• Social-mental dualism, akin to mind-body dualism, is open to critique.
• The cognitive mechanism of group attention violates social-mental dualism.
• Group attention builds common knowledge and facilitates collective action.
• Implications of group attention to other social memory phenomena are discussed.

I argue that akin to mind-body dualism, social-mental dualism is open to critique. That is, mental processes can be inherently social, with sociality ‘baked into’ the architecture of the cognitive mechanism. As a case in point, I introduce the reader to the cognitive mechanism of group attention. In particular, I focus on the differences between group attention and ideomotor imitation in terms of their (a) compliance to the social-mental dichotomy, and (b) contributions to building common knowledge—a prerequisite for human communication and collective action. Finally, I suggest possible implications of group attention scholarship for other social memory phenomena such as social contagion, socially shared memory-induced forgetting, and the saying-is-believing effect.