The Group Mind: The Pervasive Influence of Social Identity on Cognition

Humans evolved in social groups and are adapted for group living. In this chapter, we review recent behavioral, physiological, and neuroscience research that provides the psychological and neural architecture for collectively shared representations of the world - the "group mind." We describe how collective identities structure a wide range of human cognitive processes, from rapid evaluation and face memory to mental state attribution and representations of physical distance. This research underscores how psychological and neural processes underlying human cognition are context-dependent, dynamic, and flexibly shaped by motivational states, rather than inevitable, reflexive, and fixed.