Action in Unison: A Phenomenological Account of Collective Agency in Group Flow States

Recently, there has been a burgeoning interest in the so-called group flow state both in positive psychology and in the phenomenology of collective agency. Group flow is a form of collective agency in which agents experience a sense of intensified efficacy coupled with diminished individual ownership of action and heightened shared ownership thereof. This state reveals an under-theorized dimension of the sense of agency: an experience in which the source of one’s agency is a sense of oneness rather than individual autonomy. However, its first-person character remains poorly understood. I begin by revealing the lack of conceptual rigour and precision in key current psychological accounts of group flow. I then argue that phenomenology has the descriptive tools needed to generate a more precise description of the experiential character of group flow. Finally, drawing on Husserlian and Merleau-Pontyian phenomenology, I give a novel phenomenological account of the intentional structures that jointly constitute group flow. This account explains how individual agents’ sense of efficacy in action can be transformed by their sense of oneness with others.