Michael Tomasello (born January 18, 1950) is an American developmental and comparative psychologist, as well as a linguist. He is professor of psychology at Duke University.

Earning many prizes and awards from the end of the 1990s onward, he is considered one of today's most authoritative developmental and comparative psychologists. KNAW identified him as "one of the few scientists worldwide who is acknowledged as an expert in multiple disciplines". According to the APA, Tomasello's "pioneering research on the origins of social cognition has led to revolutionary insights in both developmental psychology and primate cognition."

Early life and education

Tomasello was born in Bartow, Florida and attended high school at the Taft School in Watertown, Connecticut. He received his bachelor's degree 1972 from Duke University and his doctorate in Experimental Psychology 1980 from University of Georgia.

Career

Tomasello was a professor of psychology and anthropology at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, US, during the 1980s and 1990s. (even ultrasocial) cognition is what truly sets human apart.

Uniqueness of human social cognition: broad outlines

Tomasello conducted experimental lab work with nonhuman apes to test his ideas around what makes humans unique. Based largely on lab tests, he argued that apes lack a series of skills:

  • social learning through deliberate teaching;
  • "true imitation," (imitating not only actions but also manners and styles of doing);
  • informative pointing;
  • perspectival views, looking at the same thing or event alternatively from another agent's angle;
  • recursive mind reading, knowing what others know we know they know (and so forth);
  • third-party punishment (when agent C punishes or avoids collaborating with agent B because of agent B's unfairness toward agent A);
  • building and enlarging common ground (communicating in order to share with others, and building a sphere of things that are commonly known);
  • group-mindedness (prescriptive feeling of belonging, of interdependence, of self-monitoring following general, impersonal expectations); and
  • cumulative culture, which he referred to as "the ratchet effect".

Critics of Tomasello — including Frans de Waal, Christoph Boesch, Andrew Whiten, and Volker Sommer — argued that he exaggerated human-animal differences and discounted key social abilities in nonhuman primates. Boesch, a fellow Max Planck anthropologist who studied chimpanzees in the field, argued that the severe psychological traumas experienced by Tomasello's lab subjects rendered his conclusions moot.

The overall scheme of sharing of attention and of intention involves inferring a common need; being motivated to act cooperatively to fulfill this need; coordinating individuals' roles and perspectives under the common goal of fulfilling this common need if, and only if, other agents fulfill their commitment toward that goal; and sharing the spoils fairly. Tomasello holds such dual structure of commonality and individuality as being a cognitive integration of skills in mind reading, in instrumental action, and in simulational thinking (meaning agents use an internal representation of the state of things, and simulate actions and outcomes of these actions). Individuals need to make clear or explicit, by eye contact, by gestural pantomime or else, that they intend to coordinate their actions and perspectives under a common goal. Communicating such a specific intent suggest agents can entertain a sense of forming a "we", to which they feel a sense of commitment, such that defecting from collaborating requires an apology or a taking leave. Collaborative agents also see their interaction through a representational format amounting to a bird's eye view or view from nowhere, as suggested by their skills at role switching with a partner, and at inferring what is helpful or relevant to help a partners play his or her role.

Tomasello's defense, use, and deepening of the shared attention and intention hypothesis rely on the experimental data he collected (see also work with Malinda Carpenter), an evolutionary two-step scenario (see below), and to philosophical concepts borrowed from Paul Grice, John Searle, Margaret Gilbert, Michael Bratman, and anthropologist Dan Sperber.

At one point in time, after the emergence of the genus Homo two millions years ago, Homo heidelbergensis or other close candidate became obligate foragers and scavengers under ecological pressures of desertification that led to scarcity of resources. Individuals able to avoid free-riders and to divide the spoils with collaborative partners would have gained an adaptive advantage over non cooperators. The heightened dependence on joint effort to gain food and the social selection of partners are supposed to account for an evolution toward better skills at coordinating individual's roles and perspectives under a common attentional frame (that of the hunt or scavenging) and under a common goal, giving rise to joint, interpersonal intention. Later, around 200,000 years ago, new ecological pressures presumably posed by competition within groups put those in "loose pools" of collaborators at a disadvantage against groups of coherently collaborative individuals working for a common territorial defense. "Individuals ... began to understand themselves as members of particular social group with a particular identity".

The sharing of attention and of intention is taken to be prior to language in evolutionary time and in an individual's lifetime, while conditioning language's acquisition through the parsing of joint attentional scenes into actors, objects, events, and the like. More broadly, Tomasello sees the sharing of attention and of intention as the roots of humans' cultural world (the roots of conventions, of group identity, of institutions): "Human reasoning, even when it is done internally with the self, is ... shot through and through with a kind of collective normativity in which the individual regulates her actions and thinking based on the group's normative conventions and standards".

  • Klaus Jacobs Research Prize, 2011
  • Wiesbadener Helmuth Plessner Prize, 2014
  • Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award, American Psychological Association, 2015
  • American Academy of Arts and Sciences (elected, 2017)
  • National Academy of Sciences (elected, 2017)
  • Pour le Mérite for Sciences and Arts, 2020
  • David Rumelhart Prize, Cognitive Science Society, 2022

Selected works

  • Tomasello, M. & Call, J. (1997). Primate Cognition. Oxford University Press.
  • Tomasello, M. (1999). The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition, Harvard University Press. (Winner of the William James Book Award of the APA, 2001)
  • Tomasello, M. (2003). Constructing a Language: A Usage-Based Theory of Language Acquisition, Harvard University Press. (Winner of the Cognitive Development Society Book Award, 2005)
  • Tomasello, M. (2008). Origins of Human Communication, MIT Press. (Winner of the Eleanor Maccoby Book Award of the APA, 2009)
  • Tomasello, M. (2009). Why We Cooperate, MIT Press.
  • Tomasello, M. (2014). A Natural History of Human Thinking, Harvard University Press.
  • Tomasello, M. (2016). A Natural History of Human Morality, Harvard University Press. (Winner of the Eleanor Maccoby Book Award of the APA, 2018)
  • Tomasello, M. (2019). Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny. Harvard University Press.
  • Tomasello, M. (2022). The Evolution of Agency: From Lizards to Humans. MIT Press.

See also

  • Dawn of Humanity (2015 PBS film)

Notes

  • Official website at Duke University
  • Origin of Human Communication, Jean Nicod Lectures (2006)