Shared Intentionality
Concept note — the cognitive capacity to form “we-intentions,” and why it’s the foundation of the village problem.
What It Is
Shared intentionality is the human capacity to form we-intentions — the cognitive shift from “I am doing this” to “we are doing this together.” It’s what distinguishes genuine collaboration from parallel individual action. Two people pushing the same cart is not shared intentionality. Two people who understand themselves as jointly pushing a cart — who monitor each other’s effort, adjust to each other, and hold a shared representation of the goal — is.
Michael Tomasello (A Natural History of Human Thinking, 2014; Becoming Human, 2019) argues this is the cognitive innovation that makes humans unique. Other primates have individual intentionality — they pursue goals, make plans, use tools. Only humans routinely form shared intentions: joint goals, joint attention, joint commitment to a collaborative activity, with mutual awareness that both parties understand the arrangement.
Tomasello traces a developmental sequence. First comes joint intentionality — two individuals forming a shared goal (“we’re doing this together”). Then collective intentionality — a group forming institutional norms, roles, and shared understandings that persist beyond any particular interaction (“this is how we do things”). Collective intentionality is what makes culture, institutions, and — critically — communities possible.
The “We” Problem
Shared intentionality is not automatic. It requires:
- Common ground — shared knowledge, shared assumptions, enough mutual understanding to form a joint representation of the situation. You can’t form a “we” with someone whose model of the world you don’t understand at all.
- Mutual recognition — both parties have to recognize that the other is a partner in the activity, not just an instrument or an obstacle. This is Tomasello’s key distinction from dominance-based social organization.
- Joint commitment — a felt obligation to the shared activity that persists through difficulty. You don’t bail on a “we” the way you bail on an “I.” Joint commitment creates its own gravity.
This has an immediate implication for Wellspring: you can’t start with 25 strangers and expect shared intentionality on day one. Common ground has to be built. Mutual recognition has to develop. Joint commitment has to be tested. The question is what structures and experiences accelerate this — and what prevent it from forming at all.
Connection to Reification
Reification is what happens when the products of shared intentionality get detached from the ongoing shared practice that created them. Berger and Luckmann describe this precisely: institutions begin as shared human activities, then harden into “objective” structures that feel external and given. The bylaws were written by people deliberating together. Two years later, the bylaws feel like constraints imposed from outside. The shared intentionality that produced them has been forgotten, and the product has been reified.
The antidote is not to avoid institutions — you need bylaws, you need norms, you need structures. The antidote is to maintain the practice of shared intentionality around those structures. Bylaws that are revisited, re-debated, and re-committed to remain living expressions of shared intention. Bylaws that sit in a drawer are reified artifacts of a dead “we.”
Connection to the Magic Circle
The Magic Circle is what happens when shared intentionality is bounded rather than generative. A community can develop genuine shared intentionality internally — a real “we” among residents — while maintaining purely individual intentionality in every other context. The “we” stays inside the circle.
The deeper problem: if shared intentionality only operates within the community boundary, it’s functioning as a game — a special context where different cognitive modes apply — rather than as a capacity that’s being developed and generalized. The village problem isn’t just “can we form a ‘we’?” It’s “can we form a ‘we’ that changes how we relate everywhere, not just here?”
Connection to Dunbar’s Number
Dunbar’s number is the cognitive ceiling on shared intentionality. You can form genuine we-intentions with the people you actually know — their goals, their commitments, their patterns. Beyond about 150 people, the cognitive load exceeds capacity, and you start substituting rules for relationships, bureaucracy for mutual understanding. This is why Tomasello’s collective intentionality requires cultural structures (norms, roles, institutions) to scale beyond small groups — and why those structures are always at risk of reification.
Connection to Incidental Contact
Incidental Contact is the lowest-cost mechanism for building the common ground that shared intentionality requires. You can’t form a “we” with someone you’ve never encountered. Repeated incidental contact builds familiarity — the baseline mutual recognition that makes joint commitment possible. The path from stranger to neighbor to partner in a shared project runs through dozens of small, unplanned encounters.
This is why physical design matters for shared intentionality. Car-dependent environments prevent the encounters that build common ground. Walkable, centrally organized environments produce them automatically. The incidental contact isn’t the shared intentionality — but it’s the precondition.
The Formation Challenge
Wellspring faces a specific version of the shared intentionality problem: how do you develop genuine “we-intentions” among people who chose to move into the same development but may not share much else?
The project has several structural advantages:
Cooperative governance as joint intentionality practice. Every governance meeting is an exercise in forming shared goals, deliberating together, and committing jointly to decisions. If done well, this is repeated practice at the core skill. If done badly — if governance becomes a vote-and-comply structure rather than genuine deliberation — the practice doesn’t develop.
Shared maintenance as embodied collaboration. Working together on physical tasks — gardening, repairs, cleaning common space — is joint intentionality at its most concrete. You’re literally doing something together, adjusting to each other, producing a shared outcome. This is why community workdays matter beyond their utilitarian function: they’re training in “we.”
The financial structure as shared commitment. The CLT ground lease, the cooperative blanket mortgage, the shared equity structure — these create literal shared stakes. Your housing costs are connected to your neighbors’ housing costs. The community’s financial health is your financial health. This isn’t abstract solidarity; it’s structural interdependence.
And several risks:
Ideological “we” as substitute for practiced “we.” It’s easy to share a vision statement and feel like you’ve formed shared intentionality. But agreeing on principles is not the same as practicing joint commitment through difficulty. The “we” has to be forged in the work, not just declared in the mission.
Founder effects. If the founding group develops strong shared intentionality among themselves, new residents may experience the community as a pre-formed “we” they’re trying to join rather than a “we” they’re co-creating. This is the magic circle forming around the founding cohort. Onboarding has to be genuine co-creation, not assimilation.
Capacity constraints. Per Self-Determination Theory, shared intentionality has a cognitive cost. Forming and maintaining we-intentions requires executive function — monitoring the shared goal, adjusting to the partner, managing the joint commitment. For residents with limited capacity, the activation energy of shared intentionality may be too high unless the community creates low-cost entry points. Incidental contact, low-stakes shared tasks, and predictable rhythms all reduce this cost.
The Design Question
The question isn’t whether Wellspring can produce shared intentionality — any group of humans living together will develop some. The questions are:
- How deep does it go? Surface-level (“we share a parking lot”) vs. genuine (“we are jointly committed to each other’s flourishing”).
- How wide does it reach? Only among the founding cohort, or across the whole community including newcomers?
- Does it transfer? Only inside the community boundary, or does the capacity for “we-thinking” generalize to other relationships and contexts?
- Does it survive reification? When the norms harden into structures, does the shared practice that produced them persist?
These are the village problem, stated in cognitive terms.