According to Searle, objective social reality is literally created by means of we-intentions.
Other examples of social institutions created by we-intentions are employment, ownership of private property, games, universities, political parties, governments, and, most importantly for Searle, language.
Although we-intentions are held only by individuals, they are not reducible to I-intentions; in other words, a we-intention is not merely the sum of a certain number of I-intentions.
Collective intentions, or "we-intentions," entail the existence of individual intentions, or "I-intentions," because a person cannot intend that he and others do something without also intending that he do his part (and because there is no distinct entity, over and above the individual, that could be said to be the bearer of a collective intention).
An important feature of we-intentions in their role as creators of social institutions is that they can be iterated: given a we-intention of the form "X counts as Y in C," the "Y" in the intention may become the "X" in a higher-level intention.
How, then, can individuals have we-intentions?
In collective practical deliberation, there may be "we-intentions" to endorse as a group member.
We-intentions are a matter of a "shared point of view" that involves identification with a group (Sellars 1980: 101).
How do the we-intentions of individual participants have to be related to each other in order to constitute a genuine collective intention?
The results show that cooperative game features induce we-intentions via positively increasing group norms, social identity, joint commitment, attitudes toward cooperation, and anticipated positive emotions.
