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Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny
A radical reconsideration of how we develop the qualities that make us human, based on decades of cutting-edge experimental work by the former director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
Virtually all theories of how humans have become such a distinctive species focus on evolution. Here, Michael Tomasello proposes a complementary theory of human uniqueness, focused on development. Building on the seminal ideas of Vygotsky, his data-driven model explains how those things that make us most human are constructed during the first years of a child’s life.
Tomasello assembles nearly three decades of experimental work with chimpanzees, bonobos, and human children to propose a new framework for psychological growth between birth and seven years of age. He identifies eight pathways that starkly differentiate humans from their closest primate social cognition, communication, cultural learning, cooperative thinking, collaboration, prosociality, social norms, and moral identity. In each of these, great apes possess rudimentary abilities. But then, Tomasello argues, the maturation of humans’ evolved capacities for shared intentionality transform these abilities―through the new forms of sociocultural interaction they enable―into uniquely human cognition and sociality. The first step occurs around nine months, with the emergence of joint intentionality, exercised mostly with caregiving adults. The second step occurs around three years, with the emergence of collective intentionality involving both authoritative adults, who convey cultural knowledge, and coequal peers, who elicit collaboration and communication. Finally, by age six or seven, children become responsible for self-regulating their beliefs and actions so that they comport with cultural norms.
Becoming Human places human sociocultural activity within the framework of modern evolutionary theory, and shows how biology creates the conditions under which culture does its work.
Virtually all theories of how humans have become such a distinctive species focus on evolution. Here, Michael Tomasello proposes a complementary theory of human uniqueness, focused on development. Building on the seminal ideas of Vygotsky, his data-driven model explains how those things that make us most human are constructed during the first years of a child’s life.
Tomasello assembles nearly three decades of experimental work with chimpanzees, bonobos, and human children to propose a new framework for psychological growth between birth and seven years of age. He identifies eight pathways that starkly differentiate humans from their closest primate social cognition, communication, cultural learning, cooperative thinking, collaboration, prosociality, social norms, and moral identity. In each of these, great apes possess rudimentary abilities. But then, Tomasello argues, the maturation of humans’ evolved capacities for shared intentionality transform these abilities―through the new forms of sociocultural interaction they enable―into uniquely human cognition and sociality. The first step occurs around nine months, with the emergence of joint intentionality, exercised mostly with caregiving adults. The second step occurs around three years, with the emergence of collective intentionality involving both authoritative adults, who convey cultural knowledge, and coequal peers, who elicit collaboration and communication. Finally, by age six or seven, children become responsible for self-regulating their beliefs and actions so that they comport with cultural norms.
Becoming Human places human sociocultural activity within the framework of modern evolutionary theory, and shows how biology creates the conditions under which culture does its work.
392 pages, Hardcover
First published December 18, 2018
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1471 people want to read
About the author
Michael Tomasello
43 books160 followersMichael Tomasello is an American developmental and comparative psychologist. He is a co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.
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January 1, 2021
Tomasello argues for the thesis that many cognitive capacities that distinguish humans from the great apes essentially rely on one foundational capacity, that of joint and collective intentionality . Joint intentionality is the capacity for two humans, in their interaction, to both understand that they have a shared goal, and to be mutually aware of the perspective or role of the other. For example, even eight-month-old infants are capable of pointing to an object with the goal that their caretakers become aware of the object alongside themselves. When the caretaker attends to the object, the infant is implicitly aware that the caretaker sees the object and knows that the infant also sees the object. There are recursive inferences involved in joint intentionality scenarios: I am aware that you are aware of me. Joint intentionality may be summed up by the description that an individual is able to take up the perspective of the "we," of herself as joined with another.
Chimpanzees and bonobos, the great apes that are most phylogenetically similar to humans, are incapable of joint intentionality. While they manifest cooperative behaviors, it is necessarily the case that the motive for any individual to work together with any other is purely instrumental in nature. That is, any apparently altruistic action is made solely for one's own benefit. For example, whenever a chimpanzee breaks up a fight between two others, she will do that only if this fight might end up harming herself; otherwise, even if one of her relatives is being injured in a fight, she will not intervene. Or, mothers will not share their additional foods with their infants.
This capacity for joint intentionality develops into the capacity for collective intentionality around the age of three years. The "we" that defines the perspective central to joint intentionality is composed of two individuals, the self and another particular person. The "we" that defines the perspective central to collective intentionality is composed is a society or community as a whole. Three-year-olds are capable of recognizing that rules and norms imposed by adults are not based in the adult's authority alone, but the adult is like a representative of a greater community, who passes communal knowledge down to the three-year-old. When an adult, for example, uses an object in a particular way (waters a flower with a watering can), the child understands that this is the way the community as a whole does it, not just the way this particular adult acts. Three-year-olds will enforce social norms onto their peers if the latter violate norms. Three-year-olds will also make up rules among themselves in playing games and enforce those rules; they implicitly understand that the social normativity of rules come from social agreement, rather than from any other source.
Such joint and collective intentionality becomes the basis of moral reasoning and behavior. In joint intentionality, infants already implicitly understand that the self and other in the joint relation are equals; both must participate and fulfill their respective roles in order for the goal to be attained and for any one person to receive the good outcomes. An understanding of human equality arises from this. In collective intentionality, we become aware that all of our actions are evaluable by societal norms. We care about belonging to our social group, since evolutionarily such belongingness possesses critical adaptive advantages.
In collective intentionality scenarios, an individual occupies the perspective of the "we" that refers to the entire community; she will see herself and surrounding objects in terms of communal social norms. Young children "internalize" this perspective. Tomasello proposes that this internalization process occurs by virtue of the mechanism of the role-reversal capacity. This is the capacity to be able to simulate and understand the perspective of another person with whom one is joined in a joint intentionality scenario. If you read me a book, I can understand what it is like to read a book to someone, even though I am only literally listening to your reading. According to Tomasello, in collective intentionality scenarios in which young children only literally evaluate others according to social norms, by virtue of reversing roles they can simulate and understand "from the inside" what it's like for those others to be evaluated as such. Over such experience, children develop the capacity to sense themselves as evaluated as such, by potential others. Even in the absence of any adults or peers, children can possess an omnipresent evaluative stance on their own movements; they cannot help but cognitively and emotionally react to whatever they do according to the societal evaluation that would be made of their action.
In contrast, great apes are not capable of collective intentionality or morality. A striking study that exemplifies this is found in an "ultimatum" situation in which a subject must choose one of two options: either the subject receives an unfair division of a certain amount (2 out of 10 goods), or she refuse and receive nothing at all. Human adults often refuse. But great apes always take the option in which they attain the most material goods, even if it is unfair. Great apes are not sensitivity to fairness, and so standards of goodness are defined by numerical quantity; but for humans, standards of goodness are defined by moral standards of fairness and equality.
Another key example is that both great apes and human infants are capable of recognizing themselves in mirrors. But human infants are immediately shy or coy, or they even turn away and bury their heads in their mothers' laps, upon seeing their reflection. Apes do not react in any such way; they inspect their bodies in the mirrors without any emotional difficulty or complexity. This shows that even young human infants can't help but see themselves with the implicit understanding that this is how other people see them; hence they get shy or coy. Apes do not possess any such societal perspective, which they take up and let frame their experience of viewing themselves in mirrors.
So overall, we humans always see and think from the perspective of community; social norms are always used to evaluate and interpret any situation, before we can become self-aware of the situation or choose to see or think about it in any other way. These social norms are structured to serve community interests. So humans and apes are similar in that both fundamentally see and think about the world in instrumental or goal-seeking ways. But they differ in that these goals are inevitably communal for humans, while they are always individualistic for apes.
I found this book an extremely important read. I've followed some of Tomasello's work previously, but did not notice the thesis that he proposes here. It goes against the grain of the vast majority of western philosophical thinking, which assumes that our perspective is purely our own, and a societal perspective requires efforts to think beyond oneself. Tomasello shows that our perspective is always social in nature, and it requires efforts to abstract from that and try to imagine how one would see the world independently of evaluation of social norms (and perhaps this effort is futile). Tomasello shows this by presenting an abundance of empirical studies. These are very fun and easy to read. His thesis in the end is very well-grounded. It's a stunningly powerful way to understand how we can form the societal complexes and bodies of knowledge that we do. It's a stunningly elegant way to understand how we can differ from apes so fundamentally, given that humans and apes are pretty much identical with respect to many sensorimotor and cognitive capacities.
I'm interested in the implications of Tomasello's work for our understanding of language. Tomasello only briefly mentions that linguistic items (words, phrases, whole utterances) are socially normative in nature, and language crucially enables us to attend to the same object, when that object is not available in the distal environment. Moreover, language enables our greater access to each other's perspectives or roles in a given joint situation, for our clarifying our common ground, and for our justification of actions if they appear to violate social norms. I think Tomasello is spot-on that the ontogenetic origin of language is the motivation to get others to attend to the same thing that is preoccupying oneself. I think he is also spot-on that language allows us to "travel" across different perspectives. It is amazing to think about the features and underlying processes of language that must be in place in order for language to fulfill these functions. This is not Tomasello's project in any way, but is just something I'm curious about.
Chimpanzees and bonobos, the great apes that are most phylogenetically similar to humans, are incapable of joint intentionality. While they manifest cooperative behaviors, it is necessarily the case that the motive for any individual to work together with any other is purely instrumental in nature. That is, any apparently altruistic action is made solely for one's own benefit. For example, whenever a chimpanzee breaks up a fight between two others, she will do that only if this fight might end up harming herself; otherwise, even if one of her relatives is being injured in a fight, she will not intervene. Or, mothers will not share their additional foods with their infants.
This capacity for joint intentionality develops into the capacity for collective intentionality around the age of three years. The "we" that defines the perspective central to joint intentionality is composed of two individuals, the self and another particular person. The "we" that defines the perspective central to collective intentionality is composed is a society or community as a whole. Three-year-olds are capable of recognizing that rules and norms imposed by adults are not based in the adult's authority alone, but the adult is like a representative of a greater community, who passes communal knowledge down to the three-year-old. When an adult, for example, uses an object in a particular way (waters a flower with a watering can), the child understands that this is the way the community as a whole does it, not just the way this particular adult acts. Three-year-olds will enforce social norms onto their peers if the latter violate norms. Three-year-olds will also make up rules among themselves in playing games and enforce those rules; they implicitly understand that the social normativity of rules come from social agreement, rather than from any other source.
Such joint and collective intentionality becomes the basis of moral reasoning and behavior. In joint intentionality, infants already implicitly understand that the self and other in the joint relation are equals; both must participate and fulfill their respective roles in order for the goal to be attained and for any one person to receive the good outcomes. An understanding of human equality arises from this. In collective intentionality, we become aware that all of our actions are evaluable by societal norms. We care about belonging to our social group, since evolutionarily such belongingness possesses critical adaptive advantages.
In collective intentionality scenarios, an individual occupies the perspective of the "we" that refers to the entire community; she will see herself and surrounding objects in terms of communal social norms. Young children "internalize" this perspective. Tomasello proposes that this internalization process occurs by virtue of the mechanism of the role-reversal capacity. This is the capacity to be able to simulate and understand the perspective of another person with whom one is joined in a joint intentionality scenario. If you read me a book, I can understand what it is like to read a book to someone, even though I am only literally listening to your reading. According to Tomasello, in collective intentionality scenarios in which young children only literally evaluate others according to social norms, by virtue of reversing roles they can simulate and understand "from the inside" what it's like for those others to be evaluated as such. Over such experience, children develop the capacity to sense themselves as evaluated as such, by potential others. Even in the absence of any adults or peers, children can possess an omnipresent evaluative stance on their own movements; they cannot help but cognitively and emotionally react to whatever they do according to the societal evaluation that would be made of their action.
In contrast, great apes are not capable of collective intentionality or morality. A striking study that exemplifies this is found in an "ultimatum" situation in which a subject must choose one of two options: either the subject receives an unfair division of a certain amount (2 out of 10 goods), or she refuse and receive nothing at all. Human adults often refuse. But great apes always take the option in which they attain the most material goods, even if it is unfair. Great apes are not sensitivity to fairness, and so standards of goodness are defined by numerical quantity; but for humans, standards of goodness are defined by moral standards of fairness and equality.
Another key example is that both great apes and human infants are capable of recognizing themselves in mirrors. But human infants are immediately shy or coy, or they even turn away and bury their heads in their mothers' laps, upon seeing their reflection. Apes do not react in any such way; they inspect their bodies in the mirrors without any emotional difficulty or complexity. This shows that even young human infants can't help but see themselves with the implicit understanding that this is how other people see them; hence they get shy or coy. Apes do not possess any such societal perspective, which they take up and let frame their experience of viewing themselves in mirrors.
So overall, we humans always see and think from the perspective of community; social norms are always used to evaluate and interpret any situation, before we can become self-aware of the situation or choose to see or think about it in any other way. These social norms are structured to serve community interests. So humans and apes are similar in that both fundamentally see and think about the world in instrumental or goal-seeking ways. But they differ in that these goals are inevitably communal for humans, while they are always individualistic for apes.
I found this book an extremely important read. I've followed some of Tomasello's work previously, but did not notice the thesis that he proposes here. It goes against the grain of the vast majority of western philosophical thinking, which assumes that our perspective is purely our own, and a societal perspective requires efforts to think beyond oneself. Tomasello shows that our perspective is always social in nature, and it requires efforts to abstract from that and try to imagine how one would see the world independently of evaluation of social norms (and perhaps this effort is futile). Tomasello shows this by presenting an abundance of empirical studies. These are very fun and easy to read. His thesis in the end is very well-grounded. It's a stunningly powerful way to understand how we can form the societal complexes and bodies of knowledge that we do. It's a stunningly elegant way to understand how we can differ from apes so fundamentally, given that humans and apes are pretty much identical with respect to many sensorimotor and cognitive capacities.
I'm interested in the implications of Tomasello's work for our understanding of language. Tomasello only briefly mentions that linguistic items (words, phrases, whole utterances) are socially normative in nature, and language crucially enables us to attend to the same object, when that object is not available in the distal environment. Moreover, language enables our greater access to each other's perspectives or roles in a given joint situation, for our clarifying our common ground, and for our justification of actions if they appear to violate social norms. I think Tomasello is spot-on that the ontogenetic origin of language is the motivation to get others to attend to the same thing that is preoccupying oneself. I think he is also spot-on that language allows us to "travel" across different perspectives. It is amazing to think about the features and underlying processes of language that must be in place in order for language to fulfill these functions. This is not Tomasello's project in any way, but is just something I'm curious about.
February 8, 2019
An unexpectedly pleasant surprise that this book contained was a deeper understanding on the nature of high functioning autism and what differentiates neuro-diverse from neuro-typical individuals while providing a coherent narrative on what it means to become human while always including the complete context of the human condition from mostly a psychological and neuroscience perspective.
A truth about every process studied for a population as a whole is that the total amount of useful information (variability) that can be extracted is composed of the information contained within each of the groups that make up the whole and the information extracted between the groups; for total information extraction there is only within and between; the information can lie nowhere else and is usually confounded with the only exception being that of a well designed experiment. The one thing we know about the human condition is it is not a well designed experiment and we have to play the hands from which the cards have been dealt to us!
The author did everything he could in order to tell the full story on the nature, essence and development on how we became human as a species, how we become human as individuals and what uniquely differentiates us from our closest animal cousins. The author takes all the variables that make us human and squeezes them out of the data and forms a coherent story.
I liked this book more than most books that I’ve read recently. It relentlessly presents experimental results that tell a story of human development. It doesn’t trivialize evolutionary psychology or confound explanatory variables in a misleading manner similar to a manner that I’ve seen elsewhere (e.g. see Steven Pinker’s misleading books, or any other book which uses the ‘just so stories’ approach to evolutionary psychology in order to fabricate a modern day truism picked from scratching their butt while pretending to explain deep truths for who we are as humans that typically start off with some pseudo-scientific statement such as: ‘men do such and such because women are such and such because of evolutionary pressures’).
The author is exhaustive in his presentation. He doesn’t talk about Hegel whatsoever but I’m going to just for a moment. For Hegel what is in us (immanent) is certain; what is outside of us (transcendental) is truth; and our past as individuals and as humanity has influenced our present while the influences of the present enables us to interpret the past and see it differently from what others would have in the past. The author is upfront in his analysis and phrases the question as one of nature verse nurture or maturation v. experience or various other similar ways or as Hegel would say immanent v. transcendental, and who we are at any moment must be interpreted by the influences of our past history. Now, Hegel will say that there is no self without another and the other is part of a social group. The author uses this kind of formulation but not explicitly, for example, he’ll say the child develops beyond himself by jointly intentionally acting with one another and then that becomes a ‘we’ with a ‘shared intentionality’ beyond the child’s own self identity until the child becomes part of a group and so on.
The author says we are more than just our experiences and does mention the Bayesian theory of cognitive learning (the author is exhaustive in his presentation!) as inadequate in comparison to his preferred theory. He relies too much on ‘the theory of mind’ (imo), but at least he doesn’t mention mirror neurons. He mentions that the lack of ‘theory of mind’ (mind reading) partially accounts for autism (he’ll always use the word ‘autism’ not Aspergers and usually means High Functioning Autism when he refers to autism) and that intentionality and lack of taking another’s perspective can also contribute to autism. He never considers autism in isolation, but only in comparison with the deficient part of the greater human context of becoming.
This is definitely not your run of the mill book. I’m surprised that audible had a version of it since it has a complexity within it that is not typical of most popular scientific books. The author synthesizes gobs of experiments and presents the story that he thinks explains what it means to become human as a person, as a species and as an animal through comparisons and contrasts.
A truth about every process studied for a population as a whole is that the total amount of useful information (variability) that can be extracted is composed of the information contained within each of the groups that make up the whole and the information extracted between the groups; for total information extraction there is only within and between; the information can lie nowhere else and is usually confounded with the only exception being that of a well designed experiment. The one thing we know about the human condition is it is not a well designed experiment and we have to play the hands from which the cards have been dealt to us!
The author did everything he could in order to tell the full story on the nature, essence and development on how we became human as a species, how we become human as individuals and what uniquely differentiates us from our closest animal cousins. The author takes all the variables that make us human and squeezes them out of the data and forms a coherent story.
I liked this book more than most books that I’ve read recently. It relentlessly presents experimental results that tell a story of human development. It doesn’t trivialize evolutionary psychology or confound explanatory variables in a misleading manner similar to a manner that I’ve seen elsewhere (e.g. see Steven Pinker’s misleading books, or any other book which uses the ‘just so stories’ approach to evolutionary psychology in order to fabricate a modern day truism picked from scratching their butt while pretending to explain deep truths for who we are as humans that typically start off with some pseudo-scientific statement such as: ‘men do such and such because women are such and such because of evolutionary pressures’).
The author is exhaustive in his presentation. He doesn’t talk about Hegel whatsoever but I’m going to just for a moment. For Hegel what is in us (immanent) is certain; what is outside of us (transcendental) is truth; and our past as individuals and as humanity has influenced our present while the influences of the present enables us to interpret the past and see it differently from what others would have in the past. The author is upfront in his analysis and phrases the question as one of nature verse nurture or maturation v. experience or various other similar ways or as Hegel would say immanent v. transcendental, and who we are at any moment must be interpreted by the influences of our past history. Now, Hegel will say that there is no self without another and the other is part of a social group. The author uses this kind of formulation but not explicitly, for example, he’ll say the child develops beyond himself by jointly intentionally acting with one another and then that becomes a ‘we’ with a ‘shared intentionality’ beyond the child’s own self identity until the child becomes part of a group and so on.
The author says we are more than just our experiences and does mention the Bayesian theory of cognitive learning (the author is exhaustive in his presentation!) as inadequate in comparison to his preferred theory. He relies too much on ‘the theory of mind’ (imo), but at least he doesn’t mention mirror neurons. He mentions that the lack of ‘theory of mind’ (mind reading) partially accounts for autism (he’ll always use the word ‘autism’ not Aspergers and usually means High Functioning Autism when he refers to autism) and that intentionality and lack of taking another’s perspective can also contribute to autism. He never considers autism in isolation, but only in comparison with the deficient part of the greater human context of becoming.
This is definitely not your run of the mill book. I’m surprised that audible had a version of it since it has a complexity within it that is not typical of most popular scientific books. The author synthesizes gobs of experiments and presents the story that he thinks explains what it means to become human as a person, as a species and as an animal through comparisons and contrasts.
Want to read
April 29, 2021I just listened to a fascinating podcast interview with the author (Social Science Bites) and decided to drop this here as a bookmark. I hope some of my friends read this. I hope I do, too, but I've been struggling with long-form reading recently, and my TBR shelve is huge.
I see that I read and enjoyed his Why We Cooperate ; this one looks even better.
Ah, a final note: at one point he mentioned that one feature that humans lost, relative to our primate relatives, is a strict dominance hierarchy. That brought to mind Sarah Blaffer Hrdy's Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding , and made me wonder whether this could connect to her thesis (if I remember it correctly) that our ancestors passed through a matrilocal phase.
I see that I read and enjoyed his Why We Cooperate ; this one looks even better.
Ah, a final note: at one point he mentioned that one feature that humans lost, relative to our primate relatives, is a strict dominance hierarchy. That brought to mind Sarah Blaffer Hrdy's Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding , and made me wonder whether this could connect to her thesis (if I remember it correctly) that our ancestors passed through a matrilocal phase.
April 26, 2020
The book deals with questions that should intrigue most of us -- why are human minds so very different from all other animal minds, and particularly those of the great apes, with whom we share so much of our evolutionary history and genetic makeup. There are several dimensions to this question -- what are the specific differences; how do they manifest as a child grows up; what specific advantages these changes might have offered as these traits developed during our evolution; and finally how much of these differences are influenced by different human cultures and what are universal.
This is an academic book, intended for scholarly audience. Therefore, there is no attempt to tell an enjoyable story or explain things in detail. It assumes that the reader is either already familiar with all the references made, or can make the connection. I, being an outsider, had to read very slowly and closely, often rereading parts to fully comprehend the argument. However, that only made the book a little more difficult to understand but not impossible.
The author tries to answer all the questions he raised through the evidence of other research work and the substantial research done by his own group. The argument seems rock solid to an outsider like me. There may be flaws in his theory, but that can only be questioned by other researchers in his area. To me, it not only sounded very convincing, but it also harmonized with everything I have read before in the areas of mind, consciousness, neuroscience, and early childhood development.
If the questions raised by the book intrigues you then perhaps you should give it a try. It was very rewarding for me.
This is an academic book, intended for scholarly audience. Therefore, there is no attempt to tell an enjoyable story or explain things in detail. It assumes that the reader is either already familiar with all the references made, or can make the connection. I, being an outsider, had to read very slowly and closely, often rereading parts to fully comprehend the argument. However, that only made the book a little more difficult to understand but not impossible.
The author tries to answer all the questions he raised through the evidence of other research work and the substantial research done by his own group. The argument seems rock solid to an outsider like me. There may be flaws in his theory, but that can only be questioned by other researchers in his area. To me, it not only sounded very convincing, but it also harmonized with everything I have read before in the areas of mind, consciousness, neuroscience, and early childhood development.
If the questions raised by the book intrigues you then perhaps you should give it a try. It was very rewarding for me.
May 26, 2019
Really fascinating book about some of the social and relational traits that made us human and different from all the other not as cool species of animals. At times, he gets very scientific and it seems as though he is engaging with other evolutionary scholars, but it's a readable book that has a lot of interesting insights if you can make it through.
March 20, 2020
(...)
Tomasello’s scope is large. He ties the development of human cognition and human sociality together, resulting in synthesizing insights about social norms & moral identity. This in not only a comparative psychology book, but an important work on ethics too. Truly a tour de force, and the first theory I’ve come across that convincingly brings cognition, evolution and ethics together – not in a normative way, but by describing the pathways of how these things arise, starting with newborn babies.
(...)
At first, I was a bit suspicious of Tomasello’s claims: I have read quite a lot of Frans de Waal and the likes, and my intellectual stance the last decade or so had been to not overestimate human uniqueness – not in language skills, not in cognition, etc. I considered differences between humans and other animals basically a matter of degree.
To a certain extent this obviously still holds, but one of the merits of Tomasello is that he uses large sets of experimental data that clearly show there are two things that are unique in humans: “shared intentionality” and “collective intentionality”. Basically, the fact that we humans do things together, know that we do things together and have elaborate insights in other humans’ mental states that influence our own mental states. So it’s not only cooperation itself that is important, but the fact that it is a form of recursive cooperation.
Language obviously is important for all of this, and so this is not only an ethics book, but one that should interest linguists too. The same goes for the cultural transmission of knowledge: instructed learning basically doesn’t exist in the rest of the animal kingdom, so yes, pedagogy too.
Rather than try to summarize Tomasello’s theory, in the remainder of this review I’ll do two things: first I’ll list an extensive amount of the information I found particularly interesting – take a look I’d say, it’s the juice of this review – and I end with a short bit on the book as a book: a few words on my reading experience, not the theory itself, so that interested readers better know what to expect.
Please read the full review on Weighing A Pig
Tomasello’s scope is large. He ties the development of human cognition and human sociality together, resulting in synthesizing insights about social norms & moral identity. This in not only a comparative psychology book, but an important work on ethics too. Truly a tour de force, and the first theory I’ve come across that convincingly brings cognition, evolution and ethics together – not in a normative way, but by describing the pathways of how these things arise, starting with newborn babies.
(...)
At first, I was a bit suspicious of Tomasello’s claims: I have read quite a lot of Frans de Waal and the likes, and my intellectual stance the last decade or so had been to not overestimate human uniqueness – not in language skills, not in cognition, etc. I considered differences between humans and other animals basically a matter of degree.
To a certain extent this obviously still holds, but one of the merits of Tomasello is that he uses large sets of experimental data that clearly show there are two things that are unique in humans: “shared intentionality” and “collective intentionality”. Basically, the fact that we humans do things together, know that we do things together and have elaborate insights in other humans’ mental states that influence our own mental states. So it’s not only cooperation itself that is important, but the fact that it is a form of recursive cooperation.
Language obviously is important for all of this, and so this is not only an ethics book, but one that should interest linguists too. The same goes for the cultural transmission of knowledge: instructed learning basically doesn’t exist in the rest of the animal kingdom, so yes, pedagogy too.
Rather than try to summarize Tomasello’s theory, in the remainder of this review I’ll do two things: first I’ll list an extensive amount of the information I found particularly interesting – take a look I’d say, it’s the juice of this review – and I end with a short bit on the book as a book: a few words on my reading experience, not the theory itself, so that interested readers better know what to expect.
Please read the full review on Weighing A Pig
March 28, 2022
This book is packed with information. There is a lot more than I could possibly absorb on first reading even though it covers areas in which I have already read extensively. Mr. Tomasello synthesizes over a decade of his research in the field of human cognitive development, along with many examples from the research of his colleagues in the development of humans and great apes.
In looking at ways in which humans are distinct from great apes, Mr. Tomasello propounds some interesting theories and explanations for, among other things, the development of language, cooperation and morality and the ways that development is differentially impacted by relationships with parents and peers. It's not fair to boil down the broad ranging analysis in this book to any single idea, but probably the most important concept is how the quality of joint intentionality separates humans from apes. When humans began to hunt together and to care for each other's children, it became an evolutionary advantage to be helpful and honest, to maintain a good reputation for being helpful and honest and to be able read others to see if they were doing so or not. The implications of this according to Mr. Tomasello were profound and multifaceted, but the main thing was that we had to learn to convey and pick up cues with each other and to act on those cues to build a functioning society.
In looking at ways in which humans are distinct from great apes, Mr. Tomasello propounds some interesting theories and explanations for, among other things, the development of language, cooperation and morality and the ways that development is differentially impacted by relationships with parents and peers. It's not fair to boil down the broad ranging analysis in this book to any single idea, but probably the most important concept is how the quality of joint intentionality separates humans from apes. When humans began to hunt together and to care for each other's children, it became an evolutionary advantage to be helpful and honest, to maintain a good reputation for being helpful and honest and to be able read others to see if they were doing so or not. The implications of this according to Mr. Tomasello were profound and multifaceted, but the main thing was that we had to learn to convey and pick up cues with each other and to act on those cues to build a functioning society.
November 1, 2022
Quite a fun-to-read book on the search for human uniqueness that covers many human and Chimpanzee studies. The core thesis rests on how human development is primed for ascertaining and playing with joint and collective intentionality. Stuff like, "I know that you know that I know that the toy is over there, and we can only get it together." Human young place emphasis on confirming and gauging adult and co-young-human shared attention that exceeds practical self-interest (which apparently our Chimp brethren don't do so much in the experiments thus far).
The way that "shared attention" rolls into "consensus reality" and the "third-person perspective" is quite interesting. This suggests an interesting path for scaffolding practical moral theory from dyadic morality, which could be a bit simpler.
I also had some personal insights concerning the concept of "shared attention and intentionality". As a philosoraptor, I really value the capacity to attain shared attention on abstract objects with co-selves. This seems to be one of my intimacy languages. xD
The way that "shared attention" rolls into "consensus reality" and the "third-person perspective" is quite interesting. This suggests an interesting path for scaffolding practical moral theory from dyadic morality, which could be a bit simpler.
I also had some personal insights concerning the concept of "shared attention and intentionality". As a philosoraptor, I really value the capacity to attain shared attention on abstract objects with co-selves. This seems to be one of my intimacy languages. xD
July 28, 2023
3,5 stars; Solid science writing on becoming a human; the ability for shared intentionality seems to be key to fully develop as a human being; in essence sociability is a necessary prerequisite; we need each other to further ourselves; the best way to take care of yourself is helping others; a message worth sharing! Bit heavy on the minutiae of all animal and human studies presented; this tends to detract from the overall message.
June 26, 2020
I found this book heavy stuff, but satisfying in the end. What I liked most about Tomasello's approach is that he considers the cognitive ontogeny of great apes as a null hypothesis for human ontogeny (unlike many primatologists who cannot resist raising apes to the level of human cognition at all costs). By first defining what apes can do, Tomasello is able to understand where humans differ from apes and how humans have expanded basic ape capacities to uniquely human capacities. Tomasello builds his theory on the concept of "shared intentionality", the capacity of humans to understand what somebody else is looking at, to understand that he or she may see it in a different way, incompletely or in another colour, and to use that shared intentionally in shared action, collaboration, language and culture. I really liked this idea and I found the arguments convincing indeed; they are based on an impressive amount of empirical research with children and apes. Still the book is fraught with so many technical terms, difficult reasoning and scientific references that it requires an effort to read through. And it lacks illustrations! The same image is repeatedly drawn in different chapters and different wordings are attached to it every time, but what is actually demonstrated by the figure, I still couldn't figure out, even after the fifth time. This is a natural scientist comment, who is accustomed to real graphs and tables in a scientific book.
July 25, 2020
This book is about ontogeny, meaning the development of an organism. From the very beginning of life as a fertilized egg to an adult organism. Here the term is applied to human ontogeny, from a cognitive perspective. Children obviously don't come into the world thinking like adults, and there isn't a quick transition period from child to adult. Rather, there is a countless gradual change over many years. It is largely inspired by the work of the Soviet psychologist Vygotsky on children's development (he coined zone of proximal development if you ever took a psychology 101 class). But it adds the latest research of developmental psychology to Vygotsky's model.
He often focuses on comparing children with great apes, since that's a clear line where the human cognitive system has developed. If they are already present in apes, they are not human by definition, although sometimes this gets blurry when the processes aren't black and white. Something that I took from the book is really how more cognitively developed children are compared to great apes. I had the impression that until a certain age they were roughly at the same level, and they are in general behavior and intelligence. However, when tested with key human cognitive features, especially social and moral ones, really young children outperform great apes by a large margin.
For example, apes have abstract cognitive representations, but early humans easily understand perspectival representations. Meaning that I can see a situation not only from my perspective but from your as well. We sort of take this for granted, but it is a quite developed cognitive skill. In addition, modern humans not only have a perspective representation but also an objective one. We understand that in addition to both our perspectives, there is an "objective" perspective that corresponds to the real-world, and it is independent of us.
But where humans really shine is social interactions. We are defined by culture, and thus biology has evolved to serve us. We have such a long period of immaturity, which is counter-productive and dangerous, to allow such a complex adaptation to the specific culture an individual is born in. The brains of young chimpanzees are about half of their adult size; they reach 90 percent of their adult size by two years of age. But the brains of humans are only 20 percent of their adult size at birth and do not reach 90 percent of their adult size until eight years of age.
Another important takeaway I got from the book and to which I was unaware of is that young children interact mostly with adults first. It would be reasonable to assume it was mostly with peers, but it is not. That only comes later. All the meaningful interactions are with adults and it is with them that they learn joint attention, cooperative communication, and social imitation. And this interaction is not only pragmatic in terms of life skills (such as breaking a coconut). If an action has no clear outcome, apes do not imitate it. But human children do because they assume it is some kind of culturally significant behavior (like a ritual). Joint attention, one of the skills mentioned, is particularly important and it is covered extensively in the book. The foundation of human beings is cooperation, but that requires us to "sync" our cognition into a shared goal, which is difficult and apes do not do reliably, their cooperation is always instrumental. Yet this emerges as early as the first year of life in humans, and by the second they are vastly better than any other ape.
This ontogenetic development is both genetically primed and socially constructed. Children are wired to learn from adults and develop the skills required to successfully integrate into our hyper cooperative society. But such skills are basic and have variation from culture to culture, which the children learn as they grow.
While I did like the book, it honestly felt overkill. I ended it having the impression that I just had an entire college module on developmental psychology. It was incredibly detailed, going into each experiment as he was building his case. Of course, this makes it very well-grounded, but it does negatively affect the reading experience. I think a lot of things could have been spared and still deliver the point well but a lot more succinctly. I am honestly baffled at how well rated the book is given the level of detail. Maybe they are all developmental psychologists or somehow managed to enjoy the little details a lot more than I did.
The book does what it promises: a very comprehensive theory of human ontogeny. But it almost does it too well and is quite academic. If you want to dive very deeply into the topic, this book would be excellent. On the other hand, if you just want a brief overview of human development, I would look into other sources.
He often focuses on comparing children with great apes, since that's a clear line where the human cognitive system has developed. If they are already present in apes, they are not human by definition, although sometimes this gets blurry when the processes aren't black and white. Something that I took from the book is really how more cognitively developed children are compared to great apes. I had the impression that until a certain age they were roughly at the same level, and they are in general behavior and intelligence. However, when tested with key human cognitive features, especially social and moral ones, really young children outperform great apes by a large margin.
For example, apes have abstract cognitive representations, but early humans easily understand perspectival representations. Meaning that I can see a situation not only from my perspective but from your as well. We sort of take this for granted, but it is a quite developed cognitive skill. In addition, modern humans not only have a perspective representation but also an objective one. We understand that in addition to both our perspectives, there is an "objective" perspective that corresponds to the real-world, and it is independent of us.
But where humans really shine is social interactions. We are defined by culture, and thus biology has evolved to serve us. We have such a long period of immaturity, which is counter-productive and dangerous, to allow such a complex adaptation to the specific culture an individual is born in. The brains of young chimpanzees are about half of their adult size; they reach 90 percent of their adult size by two years of age. But the brains of humans are only 20 percent of their adult size at birth and do not reach 90 percent of their adult size until eight years of age.
Another important takeaway I got from the book and to which I was unaware of is that young children interact mostly with adults first. It would be reasonable to assume it was mostly with peers, but it is not. That only comes later. All the meaningful interactions are with adults and it is with them that they learn joint attention, cooperative communication, and social imitation. And this interaction is not only pragmatic in terms of life skills (such as breaking a coconut). If an action has no clear outcome, apes do not imitate it. But human children do because they assume it is some kind of culturally significant behavior (like a ritual). Joint attention, one of the skills mentioned, is particularly important and it is covered extensively in the book. The foundation of human beings is cooperation, but that requires us to "sync" our cognition into a shared goal, which is difficult and apes do not do reliably, their cooperation is always instrumental. Yet this emerges as early as the first year of life in humans, and by the second they are vastly better than any other ape.
This ontogenetic development is both genetically primed and socially constructed. Children are wired to learn from adults and develop the skills required to successfully integrate into our hyper cooperative society. But such skills are basic and have variation from culture to culture, which the children learn as they grow.
While I did like the book, it honestly felt overkill. I ended it having the impression that I just had an entire college module on developmental psychology. It was incredibly detailed, going into each experiment as he was building his case. Of course, this makes it very well-grounded, but it does negatively affect the reading experience. I think a lot of things could have been spared and still deliver the point well but a lot more succinctly. I am honestly baffled at how well rated the book is given the level of detail. Maybe they are all developmental psychologists or somehow managed to enjoy the little details a lot more than I did.
The book does what it promises: a very comprehensive theory of human ontogeny. But it almost does it too well and is quite academic. If you want to dive very deeply into the topic, this book would be excellent. On the other hand, if you just want a brief overview of human development, I would look into other sources.
January 30, 2019
For those who are interested in human development and social cognition, this is one of the best books I have ever read on the topic. It summarizes a great deal of incredible research done on the topic and suggests some interesting links and ideas.
Read
December 7, 2019Michael Tomasello is one of the foremost scholars on developmental and comparative psychology, and this book is largely the culmination of his 20 years of directing the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, where he has systematically studied chimpanzee and human infant behaviour and social cognition in pursuit of uniquely human cognition and social behaviour. (He also has one of the highest h-indexes of all time; but anyway, you can read more about him on the internet.)
Here he presents his Shared Intentionality Theory, which he dubs as a Neo-Vygotskian theory of uniquely-human ontogeny. The book reads like an academic paper in many respects, albeit in a more elaborated form. The book is very cleanly organized, with each chapter fairly-exhaustively comparing a particular set of cognitive capacities in chimps and in infants (framed in terms of a developmental pathway), and iteratively building up . By the last section, where he fully fleshes out his theory, there is nothing new or surprising -- it is just the logical conclusion of the ideas that he has been working towards. To quickly summarize, Tomasello argues that uniquely human ontogeny is grounded in:
i) biological preparedness for shared intentionality as an enabling cause
ii) individual sociocultural experience for shared intentionality as a proximate cause
iii) social processes of executive regulation (as a constraining cause)
Here are some of the things I really liked about what Tomasello offers in this book:
* a cogent account of the relationship between maturation and plasticity (i.e. nature/nurture), namely that maturation largely serves as an enabling cause which scaffolds the organism to be able to be plasticly shaped by individual and social experience.
* a disclaimer on potential methodological issues in studying great ape cognition and behaviour (and in comparing them with humans). More on this below.
* an appreciation of the "two worlds" of childhood experience, i.e. peer interaction and adult interaction. Where this book really shines is in embracing what he calls the 'coordinative' dimension of social learning (in contrast to the 'transmitive' dimension), i.e. the co-creation which occurs when peers interact, and its importance in the development of capacities to reason and constructively ideate.
* very tangible schematics for the motivational, cognitive, and self-regulatory capacities involved in the various ontogenetic pathways which the theory seeks to account for; and in particular very concrete explanations for how they could have evolved from similar great ape capacities.
* a nice synthesis of the theory theory and Piagetian equilibration, employed here as part of the explanation for how the reframing of conflicting perspectival/aspectual registrations of objects/world/etc. is crucial for the emergence of an 'objective' (or perspective-less) perspective, a la Nagel's "view from nowhere". This topic is rife for exploration and integration with philosophers such as Brian Cantwell Smith and John Vervaeke.
* a well-thought-out explanatory framework for the importance of "joint attention" in human sociality, how it differs from , and how it scales up to collective intentionality (group-mindedness)
* likewise, a clear conceptualization of the emergence of conventional communication from more basic emotion-sharing and cooperative communication
* a concrete explanation of how internalization works, and how much of our moral identity and internal world is largely a process of anticipating and managing impressions that others (and the group, collectively) have of us; and how this manifests as feelings of guilt and shame
One area that was fairly lacking is in fleshing out a more complete framework for linguistic communication, beyond the basic grounding of conventional communication in recursive inference / shared intentionality / common ground and social norms. However, as repeated below, that is not the purpose of the theory - and besides, Thom Scott-Phillips does a great job of extending Tomasello's work to sketch a complete framework for the emergence and development of complex language in "Speaking Our Minds".
Tomasello fairly quickly (though not to say unfairly) dismisses both skeptics and 'boosters' of great ape intelligence, taking a 'radical' middle which isn't very radical at all -- just the old ethological adage that "even if a lion could speak, we still wouldn't understand him," i.e. (some) animals are incredibly intelligent, just not in a human way. He only acknowledges this very briefly at the end of the book, but I think it's enough to say that any criticism of Tomasello for unfairly failing to characterize great apes as intelligent is misplaced, because that is simply not the subject of this book. Rather, the book (and his theory in general) is a theory of uniquely human intelligence -- i.e., an account of how the stuff that makes us uniquely intelligent and social evolved as it did from our shared great ape ancestor.
Likewise, to paraphrase Tomasello, it would be unfair to judge his theory for failing to address something it didn't seek out to do. However, despite his repeated assurances that this is NOT a theory of general cognition or social behaviour, he repeatedly makes claims which I think go beyond his expertise, specifically that these capacities really ARE uniquely human. Don't get me wrong -- I think most of the capacities discussed herein are not as developed in any other species as they are in humans. But what he fails to appreciate is that they may be more present in other species than they are in the great apes.
There is a lot that can be written on this subject, but I will make this as quick/painless as possible: there are various capacities which Tomasello claims are uniquely human which are at least plausibly present in capuchin monkeys. A reader interested in exploring this topic should read "Manipulative Monkeys" by Susan Perry, and "The Biology of Traditions" (edited by Dorothy Fragaszy and Susan Perry). At the very least, I will mention that Guapo's games are a clear (and perhaps incontrovertible) example of role-reversal imitation in a non-human primate; and I believe there is substantial evidence for some of the other capacities, e.g. impression management wherein capuchins behave differently when they are aware that another individual is observing and evaluating their behaviour. I am also not convinced by Tomasello's dismissal of a (proto-)sense of fairness in NHPs, again with capuchins as the counter-example, and so I am skeptical of several of his other dismissals of chimp capacities.
All in all a good read, though as others have mentioned it is somewhat repetitive (which is pretty typical of this kind of book).
Here he presents his Shared Intentionality Theory, which he dubs as a Neo-Vygotskian theory of uniquely-human ontogeny. The book reads like an academic paper in many respects, albeit in a more elaborated form. The book is very cleanly organized, with each chapter fairly-exhaustively comparing a particular set of cognitive capacities in chimps and in infants (framed in terms of a developmental pathway), and iteratively building up . By the last section, where he fully fleshes out his theory, there is nothing new or surprising -- it is just the logical conclusion of the ideas that he has been working towards. To quickly summarize, Tomasello argues that uniquely human ontogeny is grounded in:
i) biological preparedness for shared intentionality as an enabling cause
ii) individual sociocultural experience for shared intentionality as a proximate cause
iii) social processes of executive regulation (as a constraining cause)
Here are some of the things I really liked about what Tomasello offers in this book:
* a cogent account of the relationship between maturation and plasticity (i.e. nature/nurture), namely that maturation largely serves as an enabling cause which scaffolds the organism to be able to be plasticly shaped by individual and social experience.
* a disclaimer on potential methodological issues in studying great ape cognition and behaviour (and in comparing them with humans). More on this below.
* an appreciation of the "two worlds" of childhood experience, i.e. peer interaction and adult interaction. Where this book really shines is in embracing what he calls the 'coordinative' dimension of social learning (in contrast to the 'transmitive' dimension), i.e. the co-creation which occurs when peers interact, and its importance in the development of capacities to reason and constructively ideate.
* very tangible schematics for the motivational, cognitive, and self-regulatory capacities involved in the various ontogenetic pathways which the theory seeks to account for; and in particular very concrete explanations for how they could have evolved from similar great ape capacities.
* a nice synthesis of the theory theory and Piagetian equilibration, employed here as part of the explanation for how the reframing of conflicting perspectival/aspectual registrations of objects/world/etc. is crucial for the emergence of an 'objective' (or perspective-less) perspective, a la Nagel's "view from nowhere". This topic is rife for exploration and integration with philosophers such as Brian Cantwell Smith and John Vervaeke.
* a well-thought-out explanatory framework for the importance of "joint attention" in human sociality, how it differs from , and how it scales up to collective intentionality (group-mindedness)
* likewise, a clear conceptualization of the emergence of conventional communication from more basic emotion-sharing and cooperative communication
* a concrete explanation of how internalization works, and how much of our moral identity and internal world is largely a process of anticipating and managing impressions that others (and the group, collectively) have of us; and how this manifests as feelings of guilt and shame
One area that was fairly lacking is in fleshing out a more complete framework for linguistic communication, beyond the basic grounding of conventional communication in recursive inference / shared intentionality / common ground and social norms. However, as repeated below, that is not the purpose of the theory - and besides, Thom Scott-Phillips does a great job of extending Tomasello's work to sketch a complete framework for the emergence and development of complex language in "Speaking Our Minds".
Tomasello fairly quickly (though not to say unfairly) dismisses both skeptics and 'boosters' of great ape intelligence, taking a 'radical' middle which isn't very radical at all -- just the old ethological adage that "even if a lion could speak, we still wouldn't understand him," i.e. (some) animals are incredibly intelligent, just not in a human way. He only acknowledges this very briefly at the end of the book, but I think it's enough to say that any criticism of Tomasello for unfairly failing to characterize great apes as intelligent is misplaced, because that is simply not the subject of this book. Rather, the book (and his theory in general) is a theory of uniquely human intelligence -- i.e., an account of how the stuff that makes us uniquely intelligent and social evolved as it did from our shared great ape ancestor.
Likewise, to paraphrase Tomasello, it would be unfair to judge his theory for failing to address something it didn't seek out to do. However, despite his repeated assurances that this is NOT a theory of general cognition or social behaviour, he repeatedly makes claims which I think go beyond his expertise, specifically that these capacities really ARE uniquely human. Don't get me wrong -- I think most of the capacities discussed herein are not as developed in any other species as they are in humans. But what he fails to appreciate is that they may be more present in other species than they are in the great apes.
There is a lot that can be written on this subject, but I will make this as quick/painless as possible: there are various capacities which Tomasello claims are uniquely human which are at least plausibly present in capuchin monkeys. A reader interested in exploring this topic should read "Manipulative Monkeys" by Susan Perry, and "The Biology of Traditions" (edited by Dorothy Fragaszy and Susan Perry). At the very least, I will mention that Guapo's games are a clear (and perhaps incontrovertible) example of role-reversal imitation in a non-human primate; and I believe there is substantial evidence for some of the other capacities, e.g. impression management wherein capuchins behave differently when they are aware that another individual is observing and evaluating their behaviour. I am also not convinced by Tomasello's dismissal of a (proto-)sense of fairness in NHPs, again with capuchins as the counter-example, and so I am skeptical of several of his other dismissals of chimp capacities.
All in all a good read, though as others have mentioned it is somewhat repetitive (which is pretty typical of this kind of book).
September 12, 2024
Like Frans de Waal and Carl Safina, Michael Tomasello is interested in what makes us uniquely human, and what animals can tell us about that. His topic is cognitive development, and he contrasts that of humans with our closest great ape relatives, with a heavy dose of cross-cultural comparisons to better illuminate what we owe to our evolutionary heritage and what is culturally determined. Tomasello identifies 8 uniquely human cognitive capacities which are adumbrated, but not fully articulated in other great apes, all of which contribute to what he calls “shared intentionality theory.” In short, humans, but not our closest primate relatives, are able to conceive of a “we” that is composed of, but independent from, “you” and “I,” and that “we” can have a joint goal. I think this is interesting as far as establishing human uniqueness goes, but man is this book a slog to get through. Intensely self-referential, Tomasello writes like a German enlightenment philosophe, lacking either de Waal’s candor or Safina’s sense of poetic lyricism. This is not an approachable book for the curious lay reader, it is treatise directed at an academic audience with a firm knowledge of ethology, philosophy, and developmental psychology. The first chapter and last two chapters are all I would recommend—they cover the core concepts at a fairly accessible level—but the majority of the book is turgid and dull.
March 12, 2024
Shared intentionality is what Tomasello takes to be a main driver in the transformation of the apes' core cognitive skills. It would develop in two steps that recapitulate our species' evolution to some extent : joint intentionality and collective intentionality. These are types of social self-regulation, by which agents hold in mind others' expectations or preferences when choosing and modulating their own behaviors while in the making or ahead of time. By and large, the contribution of Tomasello to reinstate collective, supraindividual ontology lies in showing how far reaching and ramified these self regulations are, especially as they give way to embedding communication in shared, background mental inferences.
December 2, 2019
The book has many interesting ideas, but overall I found it repetitive, and also too centered on the author's own work (which is probably fine in certain cases, but not when you want to make arguments as big as the ones in this book).
Disclaimer: I came to this book somehow biased by de Waal's book on "Are we smart enough to know how smart animals are." I found de Waal's arguments on the human vs non-human comparison more compelling.
Disclaimer: I came to this book somehow biased by de Waal's book on "Are we smart enough to know how smart animals are." I found de Waal's arguments on the human vs non-human comparison more compelling.
January 6, 2022
Seeking to make small talk, people often ask me what I'm reading; in this context "a theory of ontogeny" is an unfortunate conversation-stopper. The subject of this book is simply human childhood - what Vygotsky called Педология (paedologia), akin to but not identical with modern developmental psychology. Tomasello, an intellectual all-rounder at Duke and the interdisciplinary Max-Planck-Institut, seems equally comfortable discussing psychology, anthropology, philosophy, primatology or linguistics, and chose the word for a reason. Ontogeny might not recapitulate phylogeny as Victorian biologists supposed, but nor is a child's development explained solely within the walls of the pack 'n' play: human development follows a script that has evolved since the genus broke away from other hominids. By closely studying primate development in conjunction with that of humans, Tomasello hopes to explain what differentiated us at the dawn of our species.
Vygotsky criticised Piaget for focusing too much on the individual activities and ideas of his bourgeois Genevan subjects, without considering the influence of culture, and it is in this sense that Tomasello calls himself a neo-Vygotskian (although modern Vygotskians tend to focus more on cross-cultural, not inter-species, differences). One of the dominant ideas in modern developmental psychology goes back to a 1975 paper titled If you want to get ahead, get a theory, the so called "theory-theory" which describes children as junior scientists, developing hypotheses and performing experiments in the world. (In the spirit of our time, the prominent baby psychologist Alison Gopnik has formulated a version based on Bayesian statistical inference.)
Citing large numbers of studies (many his own) on primates, as well as on autistic and neurotypical human children, Tomasello underscores that what makes humans different is our ability to communicate, often through a nonverbal "shared intentionality", in which we consider other individuals perceptions of our thoughts (a kind of infinite recursion) and co-operate based on that. Thus chimpanzees will copy a human or another chimpanzee's actions in order to access a reward, but will fail to understand when the human gives pointers. They are capable of sympathy but not reciprocity, or a sense of "we". By contrast, "young children are promiscuous normativists", constantly looking for social and cultural cues from their caregivers.
Aside from not it being hard to gauge if Tomasello is right - excavating deep evolutionary time requires a lot of educated guessing - I wish he'd spoken more about the development of language, something which was critical in Vygotsky's model; and seems to me above all else what distinguishes us from other life on this planet.
Vygotsky criticised Piaget for focusing too much on the individual activities and ideas of his bourgeois Genevan subjects, without considering the influence of culture, and it is in this sense that Tomasello calls himself a neo-Vygotskian (although modern Vygotskians tend to focus more on cross-cultural, not inter-species, differences). One of the dominant ideas in modern developmental psychology goes back to a 1975 paper titled If you want to get ahead, get a theory, the so called "theory-theory" which describes children as junior scientists, developing hypotheses and performing experiments in the world. (In the spirit of our time, the prominent baby psychologist Alison Gopnik has formulated a version based on Bayesian statistical inference.)
Citing large numbers of studies (many his own) on primates, as well as on autistic and neurotypical human children, Tomasello underscores that what makes humans different is our ability to communicate, often through a nonverbal "shared intentionality", in which we consider other individuals perceptions of our thoughts (a kind of infinite recursion) and co-operate based on that. Thus chimpanzees will copy a human or another chimpanzee's actions in order to access a reward, but will fail to understand when the human gives pointers. They are capable of sympathy but not reciprocity, or a sense of "we". By contrast, "young children are promiscuous normativists", constantly looking for social and cultural cues from their caregivers.
It takes only a few minutes in a kindergarten setting to observe that infants and toddlers before three years of age are well attuned to the adults in the room, but are basically playing in parallel with, almost ignoring, their peers.Such cues develop over time into more sophisticated cultural frameworks. In a famous study by Piaget, preschoolers said a child who did something wrong (breaking some cups) should be punished based on the magnitude of the misdemeanour, whereas school-age children said the punishment should be based on the child's intention. As we expand our repository of shared norms, there is space for increasingly sophisticated ideas.
Aside from not it being hard to gauge if Tomasello is right - excavating deep evolutionary time requires a lot of educated guessing - I wish he'd spoken more about the development of language, something which was critical in Vygotsky's model; and seems to me above all else what distinguishes us from other life on this planet.
March 20, 2020
First, I should mention that I read this book for background related to my own cognitive studies as I develop a theory of consciousness, yet the book was written as a report on studies of developmental psychology in humans as compared to other primates, specifically great apes. The vast number of studies reported in varying degrees was very impressive. The author's theory of human psychological development through ontogeny was clear, and the studies/experiments provided significant grounding for that theory. For me, this was exactly what I had hoped the book would provide. The results of actual studies was most important.
My impression was that humans have one, or a very few, unique skills that other animals do not have, including other primates. That skill manifests early (before 9 months) as shared emotions, then as joint attention (from 9 to 36 months) and finally as perspective taking around 3 and shared agency thereafter. Whether these are separate skills or the maturing of a single skill is not completely clear to me and will require additional consideration. (Also, I may not be completely accurate in my description as I am just making notes here.)
I have some minor criticisms of the book as well. First, children were not studied "in the wild" or in their natural environment. This is to be expected, regardless of the cultural environment of the children, but I think it could alter some of the results or interpretations. Next, there was no mention of studies that included children over 7 years of age, either as participants or as mediators. Only adults were used as mediators. For the author's purposes, the 6-7 year old had reached "the age of reason" and everything after was maturation. The mediators as adults were noted to be dominant, or respected authorities, yet older children, adolescents, teenagers and young adults are all still developing and may have that same influence as adults in the studies. This dominance and submission aspect, which was noted in primate studies, was not part of the way the studies were reported for humans. This could be another criticism or could be part of the first.
Overall, this was an excellent book.
My impression was that humans have one, or a very few, unique skills that other animals do not have, including other primates. That skill manifests early (before 9 months) as shared emotions, then as joint attention (from 9 to 36 months) and finally as perspective taking around 3 and shared agency thereafter. Whether these are separate skills or the maturing of a single skill is not completely clear to me and will require additional consideration. (Also, I may not be completely accurate in my description as I am just making notes here.)
I have some minor criticisms of the book as well. First, children were not studied "in the wild" or in their natural environment. This is to be expected, regardless of the cultural environment of the children, but I think it could alter some of the results or interpretations. Next, there was no mention of studies that included children over 7 years of age, either as participants or as mediators. Only adults were used as mediators. For the author's purposes, the 6-7 year old had reached "the age of reason" and everything after was maturation. The mediators as adults were noted to be dominant, or respected authorities, yet older children, adolescents, teenagers and young adults are all still developing and may have that same influence as adults in the studies. This dominance and submission aspect, which was noted in primate studies, was not part of the way the studies were reported for humans. This could be another criticism or could be part of the first.
Overall, this was an excellent book.
November 16, 2025
What is this book about? It aims to show that “given a species-typical social environment with caring adults, the developmental pathways for … early joint intentional competencies are robustly structured maturationally, without the need for adults to actively intervene in acts of pedagogy or other forms of intentional socialization” (p. 314). The “theory” in the book’s subtitle refers to Shared Intentionality Theory. It invokes “(1) uniquely human biological preparedness for shared intentionality as enabling cause, and (2) individual sociocultural experience (made possible by uniquely human biological preparedness for shared intentionality) as proximate (efficient) cause” to explain human uniqueness (p. 304).
The main bulk of the book (around 300 pages) presents a wealth of findings from research on ape and child psychology and behaviour to support this theory. These studies cover fascinating topics such as retributive and distributive fairness, social norms, and moral identity. The book is therefore about how apes became human over the course of evolution and how infants become reasonable and responsible children. It is decidedly an academic work, and its style is rigorous. Indeed, some of the psychological experiments are very sophisticated and require careful thought to fully understand.
All in all, it is a very comprehensive account that will certainly enhance the reader’s understanding of the human condition—including our inner moral compass.
The main bulk of the book (around 300 pages) presents a wealth of findings from research on ape and child psychology and behaviour to support this theory. These studies cover fascinating topics such as retributive and distributive fairness, social norms, and moral identity. The book is therefore about how apes became human over the course of evolution and how infants become reasonable and responsible children. It is decidedly an academic work, and its style is rigorous. Indeed, some of the psychological experiments are very sophisticated and require careful thought to fully understand.
All in all, it is a very comprehensive account that will certainly enhance the reader’s understanding of the human condition—including our inner moral compass.
December 3, 2025
A fascinating, insightful, and very accessible look at the author's investigation into the development of specifically human cognition and behavioral traits in comparison to those of other great apes.
However, one gets the impression by the end of the book that he believes autistic people to not be fully cognitively human, which has some disturbing and dangerous implications.
There is also little attention or interest accorded to the significance of some of the human behaviors that are showcased within the case studies that are presented, such as believing/pretending that an inanimate/non-human object is a person and interacting with it as such (for example, in one experiment a toddler corrects a puppet when it is "doing" something the toddler has learned is wrong, but the only aspect of this which is considered worth remarking on by the author is that the toddler had internalized a rule and wanted to pass it on) and conceiving of the concept of an authority figure (that human infants and toddlers inherently recognize adults as authority figures is taken as a given not worth interrogating and there is no attention whatsoever paid to the well-known phenomenon of toddlers challenging and demonstrating defiance against adult authority figures).
Nevertheless, the book is deeply fascinating and a must-read for anyone interested in the question of what truly is human nature.
However, one gets the impression by the end of the book that he believes autistic people to not be fully cognitively human, which has some disturbing and dangerous implications.
There is also little attention or interest accorded to the significance of some of the human behaviors that are showcased within the case studies that are presented, such as believing/pretending that an inanimate/non-human object is a person and interacting with it as such (for example, in one experiment a toddler corrects a puppet when it is "doing" something the toddler has learned is wrong, but the only aspect of this which is considered worth remarking on by the author is that the toddler had internalized a rule and wanted to pass it on) and conceiving of the concept of an authority figure (that human infants and toddlers inherently recognize adults as authority figures is taken as a given not worth interrogating and there is no attention whatsoever paid to the well-known phenomenon of toddlers challenging and demonstrating defiance against adult authority figures).
Nevertheless, the book is deeply fascinating and a must-read for anyone interested in the question of what truly is human nature.
October 9, 2022
Quite comprehensive learning about human sociality, developmental observations and language. When listening to this book I started formulating the follow insights
- all forms of language, including verbal, symbolic language, is communication of bodily representation in the "individual" human, who is a completely integrated part of a social context allthough this is not realised by the mythology of autonomy
- the grammar of (human) language is akin to morality and emerges spontaneously in games, i.e. competition structured by rules, through the feedback loops of bodily imitation in a group setting
- the emergence of language is a product of the context of the ecological setting in which humans were born, that is, the individual is not the appropriate locus of analysis, as is taught in enlightenment apologetics arguing that a platonic god is necessary for human morality
- the metaphysical gods are the social products of, and perhaps the process through which, language is produced in the above mentioned context; the gods are the ultimate concern of the shared intentionality of a specific human group
- therefore, in order to really understand metaphysics, and therefore ones own private or open religiousity, one really has to understand the contextual physiology of the human bodies constituting human groups in its ecological setting
- all forms of language, including verbal, symbolic language, is communication of bodily representation in the "individual" human, who is a completely integrated part of a social context allthough this is not realised by the mythology of autonomy
- the grammar of (human) language is akin to morality and emerges spontaneously in games, i.e. competition structured by rules, through the feedback loops of bodily imitation in a group setting
- the emergence of language is a product of the context of the ecological setting in which humans were born, that is, the individual is not the appropriate locus of analysis, as is taught in enlightenment apologetics arguing that a platonic god is necessary for human morality
- the metaphysical gods are the social products of, and perhaps the process through which, language is produced in the above mentioned context; the gods are the ultimate concern of the shared intentionality of a specific human group
- therefore, in order to really understand metaphysics, and therefore ones own private or open religiousity, one really has to understand the contextual physiology of the human bodies constituting human groups in its ecological setting
September 14, 2023
Well recommended! Tomasello lays out his shared intentionality theory of human psychological development from infants to about 7 years of age, and explains all of the important ontogenic pathways that makes us unique from the great ape. He has quite a bit of experimental research to back his theory up.
What I particularly liked was the way he wrote and laid out the narrative. This is the second of Tomasello's books I've read and they have both been a joy. He's clear, precise, and thorough. Some may say that he is a bit redundant, but I'd rather say that he hits his central points home for the reader. He doesn't just go over the main ideas once or twice, but numerous times in different ways, which helps the reader remember not only the details of the ontogenic pathways and what they entail, but the overall picture.
So, I appreciate his writing style and his way of thinking. He's credible, logical, and conceptual. Whatever your knowledge level of human developmental psychology, you can understand him, where he's going and what his overall picture is. I appreciate that.
What I particularly liked was the way he wrote and laid out the narrative. This is the second of Tomasello's books I've read and they have both been a joy. He's clear, precise, and thorough. Some may say that he is a bit redundant, but I'd rather say that he hits his central points home for the reader. He doesn't just go over the main ideas once or twice, but numerous times in different ways, which helps the reader remember not only the details of the ontogenic pathways and what they entail, but the overall picture.
So, I appreciate his writing style and his way of thinking. He's credible, logical, and conceptual. Whatever your knowledge level of human developmental psychology, you can understand him, where he's going and what his overall picture is. I appreciate that.
December 22, 2019
Tomasello has been writing the same book over and over again for decades but this is probably his most fully spelled out thesis of how the developing human mind differs from that of our nearest biological cousins, the Great Apes. His basic thesis is that humans have a hard wired desire to actually cooperate and be helpful toward one another in ways that apes fundamentally do not. This explains the tremendous human closeness and the propensity for “pro-social” behavior that enables us to live in groups of up to millions at a time. This is all demonstrated through a series of carefully described experiments that tease out when humans begin to be able to at least provide helpful gazes (around 9 months) and when they actually become positively capable of cooperation (around 3 years old).
October 12, 2022
It was a wonderful overview of the literature on Human Ontogeny and the author's work in particular. I found it extremely interesting to learn how complex and intricate human interactions are. From 0-7yrs. of age so much takes place that shapes how humans develop a worldview and cognitive capacity. If you don't like a detailed analysis of comparative psychology for humans and our closest primate relatives this isn't the book for you. While it was somewhat tedious to make it through the monotone narration and dry writing style, I found the interesting insights more than enough to keep my attention. As someone who majored in psychology as an undergrad, I came away with a deeper understanding and hopefully a more up-to-date idea of the research being done in Evolutionary Psychology.
June 23, 2025
Tomasello presents an ambitious and thought-provoking theory about the developmental roots of human cognition and cooperation. The central argument—that uniquely human traits emerge through shared intentionality and cultural learning—is compelling and well-articulated. However, the book can be repetitive, and at times it feels more like an extended argument for a single idea than a richly layered analysis. Some of the empirical claims feel overstated, and alternative perspectives aren’t always given enough space. Still, it’s a valuable read for those interested in developmental psychology or human evolution, even if it could have benefited from tighter editing and a broader engagement with competing theories.
May 18, 2020
Tomasello is an engaging writer, but the book becomes repetitive. Also, he often does not have enough empirical evidence to back up his theoretical claims, and sometimes ignores empirical evidence when it goes against his theoretical claims.
October 7, 2024
A deep look into how young children develop the ability to cooperate, and its consequences for uniquely human traits, such as morality - based on contrastive comparison with the psychological development of other great apes.
August 27, 2019
Amazing read about the specific qualities humans develop.
June 27, 2020
Thought provoking explanations of how we, as humans, evolved from jungle dwellers to the concrete jungle and the genetic traits we carry with us to this day. An interesting read.
January 8, 2021
A very interesting (but highly theoretical) book on human collaboration. It's a bit of a heavy read but most enjoyable if one is interested in how humans became human.
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