Abstract
Research on the phenomenology of agency for joint action has so far focused on the sense of agency and control in joint action, leaving aside questions on how it feels to act together. This paper tries to fill this gap in a way consistent with the existing theories of joint action and shared emotion. We first reconstruct Pacherie’s (Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 13, 25–46, 2014) account on the phenomenology of agency for joint action, pointing out its two problems, namely (1) the necessary trade-off between the sense of self- and we-agency; and (2) the lack of affective phenomenology of joint action in general. After elaborating on these criticisms based on our theory of shared emotion, we substantiate the second criticism by discussing different mechanisms of shared affect—feelings and emotions—that are present in typical joint actions. We show that our account improves on Pacherie’s, first by introducing our agentive model of we-agency to overcome her unnecessary dichotomy between a sense of self- and we-agency, and then by suggesting that the mechanisms of shared affect enhance not only the predictability of other agents’ actions as Pacherie highlights, but also an agentive sense of we-agency that emerges from shared emotions experienced in the course and consequence of joint action.
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Notes
Throughout the paper we use the term “agency for joint action” to refer to the general idea of agency which is distinct from individual agency. One may well use “collective agency”, “joint agency” or “shared agency” instead, but the important point is that the term is not dependent on any specific theory of non-individual agency.
Tollefsen’s (2014) brief account of the sense of joint control in joint action is similar to Pacherie’s sense of agency for joint outcomes in that it builds on a perceived match between the predicted and actual effects of agency for joint action. The difference is that Tollefsen relates the sense of joint control functionally to controlling and monitoring joint action, whereas for Pacherie, the phenomenology of we-agency is interesting in its own right.
Feelings and emotions are types of “affect” that we, following a wide interdisciplinary consensus in philosophy, psychology, and sociology, use as an umbrella term for phenomenal states with certain valence and intensity. Emotions are felt evaluative responses to specific objects and events and they motivate the subject to act in accordance with evaluative content of the emotion; to fight or flee in danger, to retaliate or retribute when offended, to hide in shame, and so on. Feelings can be part of emotion, and they can be experienced as bodily sensations or intentional feelings directed at the particular object of emotion or as both kinds of feelings at the same time. However, not all feelings such as rapport or alienation are part of emotions. Thus when we speak about “shared affects”, we refer to shared emotions or shared feelings or both. The notion of affect has a different meaning in the so called “affect theory” that is prevalent in cultural, media, and gender studies (see e.g. Gregg and Seigworth 2010).
A possible philosophical worry about Pacherie’s -- as well as our -- project is that it is indeterminate until it is clarified whether the concept of “we” in “we-agency” refers to a distributed or a non-distributed “we” (see e.g. Bratman 2014). An example of the former could be a group of students from different schools celebrating their graduation on the same day, whereas a group of team members celebrating the victory of their team could exemplify the latter kind of “we”. Pacherie does not raise this question in her discussion for good reasons, we think. First of all, a theoretically pre-defined “we” may not be salient in the phenomenology of we-agency that purposefully avoids theory-laden accounts of experience. Second, a sharp dichotomy between a distributed and non-distributed “we” may be false in paradigm experiences of we-agency as these may combine a robust sense of self-agency with that of we-agency, as we will argue in what follows.
In interpreting the results of the limited empirical studies on the relation between self-agency and we-agency, Pacherie (2014, 38–39) warns against identifying we-agency with pre-reflective cognitive processes that are immune to conscious top-down influence. This cautious note implies that she is thinking of the sense of we-agency as something individuals can (at least sometimes) reflectively experience and exert top-down influence on. If this is the case, then the loss of self-other agential boundary seems too strong a condition for her own account of the sense of we-agency.
Although some theorists attribute intentions to groups in addition to their members, they all admit that groups act only through their members. Gilbert (2014) for example argues that the participants of joint action are jointly committed to constituting, as far as possible, a single subject of action. Yet this only amounts to the parties’ being jointly committed to emulating, by virtue of their actions, a single subject of action.
Her recent paper with John Michael (Michael and Pacherie 2015, p. 107) touches upon this issue in discussing moral sentiments and emotions as an automatic process to reduce uncertainty and achieve cooperation in social dilemma situations. The focus of that paper however is not phenomenological but functional.
The appraisal process need not be collective though it can be in some cases, such as when an emotional appraisal is formed as a result of public discussion (see Halperin 2014). More typically, though, emotional appraisals are so fast and modular that it is impossible to make let alone commit oneself to them collectively (but see Gilbert 2002, 2014).
The idea of emotions having reasons may strike one as strange. However, the idea that emotions have both justifying and motivating reasons is widely accepted in contemporary philosophy of emotions and metaethics (e.g. Greenspan 1988; D’Arms and Jacobson 2000; Helm 2008; Brady 2011). Emotions have justifying reasons as they are liable to evaluation in terms of appropriateness like other intentional attitudes. For instance, my fear is appropriate if the object of my fear has properties that render it capable of inflicting significant harm on me. Justifying reasons of shared emotions may refer to collectively accepted attitudes of a group, such as its values, goals, or intentions. The same group attitudes may also serve as motivating reasons of shared emotions. Since emotions are not under voluntary control, there can be no deliberation on reasons to feel in the same way as there is deliberation on reasons to act. However, we can talk about reasons (rather than mere causes) of emotion because human emotions are not reflexes or fixed action patterns but flexible responses to cognitively processed situational meanings.
Schmid’s two examples of shared feelings with a phenomenological fusion serve as evidence for this worry. His first example are parents who grieve over the death of their beloved child. The parents share a concern for the child and its well-being in a jointly committed sense that emerges from their love for the child as parents and their reciprocal affective ties as a couple. The second example is joy at the first performance of a symphony, shared by all participants of the event, including the audience, members of the orchestra, the composer, and the stage manager. All participants share a concern about the success of the performance but in significantly different roles. The musicians have jointly committed themselves to offering an excellent performance, whereas the audience has not committed itself to anything; its role amounts to attentive listening at most. Therefore, if a successful performance elicits shared joy with a phenomenological fusion of feelings among everyone present, as Schmid suggests, the emotions of the participants are significantly dissimilar to each other in terms of the underlying concerns, unlike in the case of the grieving parents.
For a more thorough theoretical account on the elicitation of shared emotions, see von Scheve and Ismer (2013).
Existing studies on affective synchrony focus on face-to-face interaction, and there is a lacuna in the understanding of the kind of processes that contribute to the synchronization of individual emotions in computer-mediated, linguistic and symbolic communication insofar as synchronization occurs in these contexts. Therefore, we treat the better understood emotional sharing in face-to-face interaction as a paradigm case in our analysis.
Shared emotions of this kind may not be collectively intentional as they lack a shared intentional object and an underlying shared concern. However, we would not go so far as to deny that these emotions are collective or shared in any sense. Empirical studies of shared or collective or group emotions generally do not distinguish between these importantly dissimilar types of shared emotions even if their social consequences can differ significantly, as we argue in Salmela and Nagatsu 2016.
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Acknowledgments
We thank Elisabeth Pacherie, John Michael, Hans Bernhard Schmid, Michael Schmitz, and two anonymous reviewers of this journal as well as the audience at the Philosophy of Science seminar, University of Helsinki, Sep 21, 2015 for their insightful and constructive comments to earlier versions of this paper.
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Mikko Salmela and Michiru Nagatsu contributed equally to this work.
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Salmela, M., Nagatsu, M. How does it really feel to act together? Shared emotions and the phenomenology of we-agency. Phenom Cogn Sci 16, 449–470 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-016-9465-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-016-9465-z