In the context of learning, knowledge, and human development, the social mind means being human. To be more specific, it means having an interest in society–its welfare, or the well-being of society as a whole. To have a social mind is how we understand, analyze, store, and use or apply information about the environment we live in, from the people we meet and that surround us, the relationships that matter to and define us, and everything that trickles from that (i.e. politics, culture, arts, anthropology, economy, etc.).

Thinking “inside one’s head” is essentially social thinking or cognitivism because, I quote, “Cognition is situated in embodied experience, not to the “private mind” but to the world of experience—and that experience is almost always shared in social and cultural groups—as the core of human learning, thinking, problem solving, and literacy (where literacy is defined as “getting and giving meanings using written language”) - The Social Mind (Gee 1992). In a nutshell, man is not an island; he cannot survive on his own without another human being, in many senses: physically, emotionally, socially, and mentally. Much of what we know and understand relies on perceptions established through relationships and what knowledge (and even wisdom) is passed from one to another. That is what learning and development are about and how we come to universal knowledge and language; that is collective intelligence. It is impossible for one [person] to know all. We build on each other’s ideas, on pieces of knowledge, on facts that abound from trial and error or experimentation.

As Lave, Jean, and Etienne Wenger said in Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation, “Learning is necessarily situated, a process of participation in communities of practice, and that newcomers join such communities via a process of ‘legitimate peripheral participation’—or learning by immersion in the new community and absorbing its modes of action and meaning as a part of the process of becoming a community member…Learning viewed as situated activity has as its central defining characteristic a process that we call legitimate peripheral participation. By this we mean to draw attention to the point that learners inevitably participate in communities of practitioners and that the mastery of knowledge requires newcomers to move toward full participation in the sociocultural practices of a community.

One example is the constant development of architecture and construction for infrastructure. Man has learned how to build solid foundations, regardless of weather and climate (e.g. earthquake-resistant buildings in the Pacific Ring of Fire, solid bases that permit the building of the world’s tallest skyscraper in a desert that stands on shifting sand, building dams for irrigation of land, etc.). Centuries ago, such marvels could not be fathomed, and the older men who tried, but did not have the wealth of information or experience that we now have, made haste, resulting in some catastrophes (which we eventually learned–and continuously learn from). After all, what use is learning and knowledge if there is no room for improvement, no chance for application, and no chance to pass it on for the betterment of generations to come?