The cognitive revolution in psychology moved the field from simply observing the relationship between environmental stimuli and behavior to attempting to understand how people mentally represent both the environment and their behavior within it. At first, these representations were seen as located within individual brains. Consequently, cognition was seen as an individual phenomenon. The cognitive revolution was seen as one reason for the decline of research on group-level phenomena during the 1960s and 1970s. However, more recent conceptualizations of the role of cognitive processes in social behavior have led to a resurgence in group research. One of the most influential concepts underlying this resurgence is the notion of socially shared cognitions.

The idea that cognition is a social phenomenon is not new. Early theorists such as ...