Michael Tomasello

Virtually all theories of how humans have become a distinctive species focus on evolution. Here, Michael Tomasello proposes a complementary theory focused on ontogenetic processes. Built on the essential ideas of Vygotsky, his data-driven model explains how those things that make us most human are constructed during the first six years of life.

A Theory of Ontogeny

Becoming Human

Understanding cooperation as a distinctly human combination of innate and learned behavior. Drop something in front of a two-year-old, and she's likely to pick it up for you. This is not a learned behavior, psychologist Michael Tomasello argues. Through observations of young children in experiments he himself has designed, Tomasello shows that children are naturally--and uniquely--cooperative. Put through similar experiments, for example, apes demonstrate the ability to work together and share, but choose not to. As children grow, their almost reflexive desire to help--without expectation of reward--becomes shaped by culture. They become more aware of being a member of a group. Groups convey mutual expectations, and thus may either encourage or discourage altruism and collaboration. Either way, cooperation emerges as a distinctly human combination of innate and learned behavior. In Why We Cooperate, Tomasello's studies of young children and great apes help identify the underlying psychological processes that very likely supported humans' earliest forms of complex collaboration and, ultimately, our unique forms of cultural organization, from the evolution of tolerance and trust to the creation of such group-level structures as cultural norms and institutions. Scholars Carol Dweck, Joan Silk, Brian Skyrms, and Elizabeth Spelke respond to Tomasello's findings and explore the implications.

Why We Cooperate

Origins of human communication

Tool-making or culture, language or religious belief: ever since Darwin, thinkers have struggled to identify what fundamentally differentiates human beings from other animals. Michael Tomasello weaves his twenty years of comparative studies of humans and great apes into a compelling argument that cooperative social interaction is the key to our cognitive uniqueness. Tomasello maintains that our prehuman ancestors, like today's great apes, were social beings who could solve problems by thinking. But they were almost entirely competitive, aiming only at their individual goals. As ecological changes forced them into more cooperative living arrangements, early humans had to coordinate their actions and communicate their thoughts with collaborative partners. Tomasello's "shared intentionality hypothesis" captures how these more socially complex forms of life led to more conceptually complex forms of thinking. In order to survive, humans had to learn to see the world from multiple social perspectives, to draw socially recursive inferences, and to monitor their own thinking via the normative standards of the group. Even language and culture arose from the preexisting need to work together and coordinate thoughts. A Natural History of Human Thinking is the most detailed scientific analysis to date of the connection between human sociality and cognition.

A Natural History of Human Thinking

Michael Tomasello offers the most detailed account to date of the evolution of human moral psychology. Based on experimental data comparing great apes and human children, he reconstructs two key evolutionary steps whereby early humans gradually became an ultra-cooperative and, eventually, a moral species capable of acting as a plural agent “we”.

A Natural History of Human Morality

A leading expert on evolution and communication presents an empirically based theory of the evolutionary origins of human communication that challenges the dominant Chomskian view. Human communication is grounded in fundamentally cooperative, even shared, intentions. In this original and provocative account of the evolutionary origins of human communication, Michael Tomasello connects the fundamentally cooperative structure of human communication (initially discovered by Paul Grice) to the especially cooperative structure of human (as opposed to other primate) social interaction. Tomasello argues that human cooperative communication rests on a psychological infrastructure of shared intentionality (joint attention, common ground), evolved originally for collaboration and culture more generally. The basic motives of the infrastructure are helping and sharing: humans communicate to request help, inform others of things helpfully, and share attitudes as a way of bonding within the cultural group. These cooperative motives each created different functional pressures for conventionalizing grammatical constructions. Requesting help in the immediate you-and-me and here-and-now, for example, required very little grammar, but informing and sharing required increasingly complex grammatical devices. Drawing on empirical research into gestural and vocal communication by great apes and human infants (much of it conducted by his own research team), Tomasello argues further that humans' cooperative communication emerged first in the natural gestures of pointing and pantomiming. Conventional communication, first gestural and then vocal, evolved only after humans already possessed these natural gestures and their shared intentionality infrastructure along with skills of cultural learning for creating and passing along jointly understood communicative conventions. Challenging the Chomskian view that linguistic knowledge is innate, Tomasello proposes instead that the most fundamental aspects of uniquely human communication are biological adaptations for cooperative social interaction in general and that the purely linguistic dimensions of human communication are cultural conventions and constructions created by and passed along within particular cultural groups.

Origins of Human Communication

The author presents a comprehensive usage-based theory of language acquisition, based on evidence that children possess a linguistic ability interwoven with other cognitive abilities, rather than a self-contained 'language instinct'.

A Usage-Based Theory of Language Acquisition

Constructing a Language

La natura non può creare organismi predisposti biologicamente a ogni possibile evento; crea piuttosto organismi operanti come sistemi di controllo a feedback che perseguono obiettivi, prendono decisioni comportamentali informate su come perseguire al meglio quegli obiettivi e poi verificano l’efficacia del comportamento mentre lo eseguono. In sostanza, la natura crea degli agenti psicologici. Michael Tomasello presenta qui una tipologia delle principali forme di agentività psicologica comparse lungo il percorso evolutivo che ha portato all’uomo. Disegna così l’evoluzione dell’agentività, da forme semplici di attività diretta a uno scopo fino all’azione intenzionale complessa, mediata dalla cultura, un’azione intenzionale permessa e vincolata da norme oggettive stabilite socialmente. Ogni nuova forma di organizzazione psicologica ha prodotto nuovi tipi di esperienza dell’ambiente, e in alcuni casi del funzionamento psicologico stesso dell’organismo. Insieme, queste proposte costituiscono un quadro teorico inedito, che a un tempo amplia e approfondisce gli approcci attuali nel campo della psicologia evoluzionistica.

Storia naturale dell’azione

Dalle lucertole all’uomo

Dan Isaac Slobin

These essays should appeal to international scholars in the fields of developmental psycholinguistics, cognitive science, crosslinguistic research, and both child and adult language disorders. It is an overview of many areas of cognitive science, and will be of classroom use at the graduate level in course seminars in any of these topics.

Essays in Honor of Elizabeth Bates

Beyond Nature-Nurture

¿Qué es lo que distingue a la naturaleza humana? Los teólogos han insistido en su propensión al vicio; Hobbes, en su disposición a la guerra; los padres, en las tendencias egoístas de los niños. Sin embargo, si dejamos caer un objeto frente a un niño de 2 años, lo más probable es que lo alce y nos lo alcance. Y eso, según Michael Tomasello -uno de los expertos de mayor reconocimiento internacional en el campo de las ciencias cognitivas- no es producto de una conducta aprendida. A partir de la observación de niños pequeños, Tomasello afirma que ellos cooperan naturalmente, a diferencia por ejemplo de los chimpancés, que en situaciones experimentales demuestran cierta capacidad para el trabajo en conjunto pero fundamentalmente lo eluden. En '¿Por qué cooperamos?', Tomasello individualiza los procesos psicológicos que probablemente dieron sustento a las formas más tempranas de colaboración compleja entre los seres humanos, procesos que fueron el germen de nuestras formas de organización cultural, desde el aumento de la tolerancia y la confianza, hasta la creación de estructuras grupales como las normas y las instituciones culturales. "Una fascinante aproximación a la cuestión acerca de qué hace singulares a los seres humanos." Publishers Weekly

¿Por qué cooperamos?

From the point of view of psychology and cognitive science, much of modern linguistics is too formal and mathematical to be of much use. The newly emerging approaches to language termed, "Functional and Cognitive Linguistics," however, are much less formally oriented. Instead, functional and cognitive approaches to language structure are typically couched in terms already familiar to cognitive scientists: perception, attention, conceptualization, meaning, symbols, categories, schemas, perspectives, discourse context, social interaction, and communicative goals. The account of human linguistic competence emerging from this new paradigm should be extremely useful to scientists studying how human beings (not formal devices) comprehend, produce, and acquire natural languages. The current volume brings together 10 of the most important linguists in cognitive and functional linguistics whose work is often not easily available to those outside the field. In original contributions, each of these scholars focuses on an important aspect of human linguistic competence, with a special eye to readers who are not professional linguists. Of special importance to all of the contributions are the cognitive and social interactional processes that constitute human linguistic communication. The book is of special interest to psychologists, cognitive scientists, psycholinguists, and developmental psycholinguists, in addition to linguists taking a more psychological approach to language.

Cognitive and Functional Approaches To Language Structure

The New Psychology of Language

Winner of a PROSE Award, Association of American Publishers Shortlist, Cognitive Development Society Book Award A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year A Natural History of Human Morality offers the most detailed account to date of the evolution of human moral psychology. Based on extensive experimental data comparing great apes and human children, Michael Tomasello reconstructs how early humans gradually became an ultra-cooperative and, eventually, a moral species. "Tomasello is convincing, above all, because he has run many of the relevant studies (on chimps, bonobos and children) himself. He concludes by emphasizing the powerful influence of broad cultural groups on modern humans...Tomasello also makes an endearing guide, appearing happily amazed that morality exists at all." --Michael Bond, New Scientist "Most evolutionary theories picture humans as amoral 'monads' motivated by self-interest. Tomasello presents an innovative and well-researched, hypothesized natural history of two key evolutionary steps leading to full-blown morality." --S. A. Mason, Choice

William E. Merriman

Most research on children's lexical development has focused on their acquisition of names for concrete objects. This is the first edited volume to focus specifically on how children acquire their early verbs. Verbs are an especially important part of the early lexicon because of the role they play in children's emerging grammatical competence. The contributors to this book investigate: * children's earliest words for actions and events and the cognitive structures that might underlie them, * the possibility that the basic principles of word learning which apply in the case of nouns might also apply in the case of verbs, and the role of linguistic context, especially argument structure, in the acquisition of verbs. A central theme in many of the chapters is the comparison of the processes of noun and verb learning. Several contributors make provocative suggestions for constructing theories of lexical development that encompass the full range of lexical items that children learn and use.

Young Children's Acquisition of Verbs

Beyond Names for Things

It is hypothesized that more general syntagmatic categories await the formation of a paradigmatic category of verb, and that this in turn awaits complex sentences in which verbs are treated as mental objects by other predicates.

A Case Study of Early Grammatical Development

First Verbs

Insan Iletisiminin Kökenleri

Josep Call

Professor of Psychology Yerkes Primate Center Josep Call

This book reviews all that is scientifically known about the cognitive skills of non-human primates and assesses the current state of our knowledge.

Primate Cognition

Le origini culturali della cognizione umana

From the point of view of psychology and cognitive science, much of modern linguistics is too formal and mathematical to be of much use. The New Psychology of Language volumes broke new ground by introducing functional and cognitive approaches to language structure in terms already familiar to psychologists, thus defining the next era in the scientific study of language. The Classic Edition volumes re-introduce some of the most important cognitive and functional linguists working in the field. They include a new introduction by Michael Tomasello in which he reviews what has changed since the volumes were first published and highlights the fundamental insights of the original authors. The New Psychology of Language volumes are a must-read for anyone interested in understanding how cognitive and functional linguistics has become the thriving perspective on the scientific study of language that it is today.

Cognitive and Functional Approaches to Language Structure

Si vous laissez tomber quelque chose devant un enfant de deux ans, il y a de fortes chances que ce dernier vous le ramasse. Et ceci n’est pas le fruit d’un apprentissage, affirme le psychologue Michael Tomasello. A partir d’observations d’enfants réalisées dans le cadre d’expérimentations qu’il a conçues, Tomasello montre que les enfants sont naturellement – et de façon unique – coopératifs. Dans ces mêmes expérimentations, les primates non humains, de leur côté, font montre d’aptitudes à travailler ensemble et à partager mais choisissent de ne pas ramasser l’objet tombé. Chez l’enfant, le désir quasi réflexe d’aider l’autre devient façonné, au fil du développement, par une conscience de plus en plus forte d’appartenir à un groupe. Les groupes véhiculent des attentes mutuelles encouragent ou découragent ainsi l’altruisme et la collaboration. Quoi qu’il en soit, la coopération émerge comme une combinaison distinctement humaine d’un comportement à la fois inné et appris. Dans Pourquoi nous coopérons, Tomasello identifie les processus psychologiques sous-jacents qui étaient très probablement impliqués dans les formes anciennes de collaboration complexe chez l’humain. Et finalement, nos formes uniques d’organisation culturelle : de l’évolution de la tolérance et de la confiance à la création de structures de groupes telles que les normes culturelles et les institutions. Les universitaires Carol Dweck, Joan Silk, Brian Skyrms et Elizabeth Spelke réagissent aux découvertes de Tomasello et en étudient les implications.

Michael Tomasello

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