GROUP MINDS IN ANCIENT NARRATIVE

Project Information

GROUPMINDS

Grant agreement ID: 101115022

DOI

10.3030/101115022

EC signature date 20 September 2023

Start date 1 January 2024

End date 31 December 2028

Funded under

• European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 494 750,00

EU contribution

€ 1 494 750,00

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITY OF CYPRUS
Cyprus

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - GROUPMINDS (GROUP MINDS IN ANCIENT NARRATIVE)

Reporting period: 2024-01-01 to 2026-06-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Social cognition — the capacity of humans to think, feel, and act together — is central both to lived experience and to narrative representation. Stories depict individuals as members of groups, engaged in shared intentions, collective emotions, and common identities. Contemporary philosophy and cognitive science increasingly argue that cognition is not confined to individual minds but can be socially extended and distributed across agents through shared intentionality, joint attention, group emotion, and intersubjective alignment. Despite substantial work on social cognition and parallel developments in narratology, no comprehensive framework has integrated narrative theory with contemporary accounts of distributed cognition. In particular, the representation of “group minds” in literature has not been systematically analysed as a site where social cognition is both modelled and cognitively activated. GROUPMINDS addresses this gap by building a bridge between narrative theory and accounts of socially distributed cognition, in order to understand how narrative representations of collective consciousness shape and inform human understanding of the social world. The project pursues four interrelated objectives:
- To examine how group mind is narrativised.
- To examine what kinds of intermental relations are at play in different narratives.
- To consider by which narrative means the readers are drawn to understand different aspects of social and team cognition, and thus illuminate what kinds of cognitive responses are elicited in them.
- To explore how and to what extent thinking about narrative minds feeds into thinking about human minds, cognitive interaction, and intersubjectivity in the real world.
The project focuses on Greek and Roman antiquity, a culture deeply invested in collective life — from democratic deliberation to philosophical reflection on concord and shared responsibility. Ancient genres such as historiography, epic, oratory, the novel, and philosophical texts provide a rich laboratory for examining how group cognition is constructed and experienced. Methodologically, GROUPMINDS combines narratology, cognitive approaches to narrative, phenomenology, and contemporary cognitive science. This integration of Social Sciences and Humanities is central: cognitive theory provides models of distributed cognition, while philological analysis shows how such processes are encoded and made experientially available in narrative.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

During the reporting period, GROUPMINDS has developed and implemented an interdisciplinary research framework for analysing collective cognition in ancient literature and thought. Its core scientific activity has been the systematic integration of cognitive narratology, philosophy of mind, and theories of socially distributed cognition with rigorous philological and literary-historical analysis.
- Methodological Innovation
The project’s primary achievement lies in the development of a structured analytical model for identifying and comparing representations of group minds, intermental relations, and collective agency across genres and periods. Rather than using cognitive theory illustratively, the project has operationalised concepts such as shared intentionality, distributed cognition, collective emotion, and cognitive alignment within detailed textual analyses. These concepts have been examined in dialogue with historically embedded ancient categories (e.g. civic concord, communal identity, collective responsibility), ensuring theoretical precision and avoiding anachronism.
This framework has been applied across historiography, epic, lyric and drama, philosophy, and the ancient novel. A key conceptual development has been the articulation of new literary-cognitive tools—such as “cognitive mapping” for analysing dyadic and small-scale collective cognition—extending the project beyond individual case studies toward transferable analytical models.
- Scientific Output
Within two years, the team has produced a substantial corpus of peer-reviewed and accepted publications in leading journals and volumes. Twenty-four manuscripts have been submitted; fifteen have been accepted and five are under review. These outputs extend the study of collective cognition into political theory, historiography, performance, philosophy, and collective emotion, demonstrating the project’s coherence and interdisciplinary scope.
- Consolidation of Interdisciplinary Research
The project has also established itself as a platform for sustained dialogue between Classics, philosophy, and cognitive science. A major international conference and a programme of invited lectures and workshops have reinforced its role in shaping research agendas at the intersection of Humanities and cognitive inquiry.
- Institutional and Technical Developments
The scientific trajectory has led to two structural outcomes: the development of a Master’s-level programme institutionalising Cognitive Classics, and the initiation of an immersive Virtual Reality (VR) strand translating findings on collective deliberation into experiential modelling. This extends the project from interpretation to interactive exploration of collective cognition.

OUTCOMES OF THE ACTION
The project has delivered:
- A coherent interdisciplinary framework for analysing group minds in antiquity.
- A substantial body of peer-reviewed research consolidating Cognitive Classics.
- New conceptual tools applicable across genres and periods.
- A sustainable postgraduate training structure.
- An innovative technological strand exploring experiential modelling.
Together, these achievements position GROUPMINDS as a major contribution to the cognitive humanities and to the study of collective agency and intersubjectivity in historical perspective.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The project has generated results that advance the study of collective cognition beyond the state of the art in Classical Studies and the cognitive humanities.
First, it has developed new literary-cognitive concepts. Most notably, the articulation of cognitive mapping as a framework for analysing cognitive alignment and misalignment within dyads introduces a transferable analytical tool for literary studies. Adapted from contemporary cognitive science, the concept enables narrative pairs to be examined as cognitively interdependent systems rather than isolated individuals. This innovation extends cognitive narratology beyond its traditional focus on individual minds and offers a transtemporal model applicable across genres and historical contexts, contributing new conceptual vocabulary to both literary theory and cognitive inquiry.
Second, sustained analysis of ancient group cognition has led to broader methodological and institutional innovation. The creation of a postgraduate programme grounded in the project’s analytical framework supports the institutionalisation of Cognitive Classics as a coherent field. In parallel, the initiation of an immersive Virtual Reality (VR) strand extends the project from textual interpretation to experiential modelling of collective deliberation and intersubjective alignment. These developments demonstrate how fundamental humanities research can generate sustainable training structures and innovative methodological tools.
Together, these results strengthen the integration of Social Sciences and Humanities by providing historically grounded insights into collective agency and distributed cognition.