Liz Lawly’s post on the social consequences of social tagging is great. Not only does she pull together a lot of threads from across the blogosphere she offers an excellent analysis of the ESP game developed at CMU.

The gist of her argument is that bottom-up tagging has the potential to give you poor metadata. The ESP game in particular really encourages the lowest common denominator in terms of categorization. While this is obviously a serious problem for social tagging systems, I also wonder what this phenomenon tells us about social cognition in general.

In his book Social Mindscapes , Eviatar Zerubavel talks about three levels of cognition: individual cognition, universal cognition, and social cognition. Individual cognition refers to how we think as individuals, what about our thinking is idiosyncratic and unique. Universal cognition refers to what is common in thinking amongst all humans. Social cognition is everything else: how we think as Americans, as Texans, as Catholics, as Generation X-ers, etc. Could it be that in all of these social groups, the limits of our social cognition are defined by the simplest commonly share concepts?