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The Evolution of Agency: Behavioral Organization from Lizards to Humans
A leading developmental psychologist proposes an evolutionary pathway to human psychological agency.
Nature cannot build organisms biologically prepared for every contingency they might possibly encounter. Instead, Nature builds some organisms to function as feedback control systems that pursue goals, make informed behavioral decisions about how best to pursue those goals in the current situation, and then monitor behavioral execution for effectiveness. Nature builds psychological agents. In a bold new theoretical proposal, Michael Tomasello advances a typology of the main forms of psychological agency that emerged on the evolutionary pathway to human beings.
Tomasello outlines four main types of psychological agency and describes them in evolutionary order of emergence. First was the goal-directed agency of ancient vertebrates, then came the intentional agency of ancient mammals, followed by the rational agency of ancient great apes, ending finally in the socially normative agency of ancient humans. Each new form of psychological organization represented increased complexity in the planning, decision-making, and executive control of behavior. Each also led to new types of experience of the environment and, in some cases, of the organism’s own psychological functioning, leading ultimately to humans’ experience of an objective and normative world that governs all of their thoughts and actions. Together, these proposals constitute a new theoretical framework that both broadens and deepens current approaches in evolutionary psychology.
Nature cannot build organisms biologically prepared for every contingency they might possibly encounter. Instead, Nature builds some organisms to function as feedback control systems that pursue goals, make informed behavioral decisions about how best to pursue those goals in the current situation, and then monitor behavioral execution for effectiveness. Nature builds psychological agents. In a bold new theoretical proposal, Michael Tomasello advances a typology of the main forms of psychological agency that emerged on the evolutionary pathway to human beings.
Tomasello outlines four main types of psychological agency and describes them in evolutionary order of emergence. First was the goal-directed agency of ancient vertebrates, then came the intentional agency of ancient mammals, followed by the rational agency of ancient great apes, ending finally in the socially normative agency of ancient humans. Each new form of psychological organization represented increased complexity in the planning, decision-making, and executive control of behavior. Each also led to new types of experience of the environment and, in some cases, of the organism’s own psychological functioning, leading ultimately to humans’ experience of an objective and normative world that governs all of their thoughts and actions. Together, these proposals constitute a new theoretical framework that both broadens and deepens current approaches in evolutionary psychology.
176 pages, Hardcover
Published September 6, 2022
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323 people want to read
About the author
Michael Tomasello
44 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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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
January 12, 2023
I thought developmental and comparative psychology professor Michael Tomasello's 2019 book 'Becoming Human: A Theory of Human Ontogeny' was brilliant and rigorously argued. Imagine my surprise to find the first three chapters of this short work (164 pages) practically insulting because of sloppy writing and terminological vagueness.
As a result, I decided to call it a day - even though, admittedly, the remaining chapters (about the agency of apes and humans) might play more into Tomasello's strengths. My loss, maybe, but I cannot but operate using inference if I read scientific books: if your base is brittle, I'm not going to risk dwelling in a superstructure that seems solid. It's a form a prejudice, yes, but my time is limited, and there's way too much else to read & learn.
A few examples/thoughts:
1. It starts with an unclear conception of 'agency' itself:
"Agency is thus not about all of the many and varied things that organisms do - from building anthills to caching nuts - but rather about how' they do them. Individuals acting as agents direct and control their won actions, whatever those actions may be specifically. The scientific challenge is to identify the underlying psychological organization that makes such individual direction and control possible."
It seems to me that the real scientific challenge is to identify the underlying neural pathways that guide our muscles to perform specific behavior. Tomasello is not clear at all about what "psychological" entails, and how that ties into neurology, biology & evolution. I would advice him to read 2019's 'The Evolution of the Sensitive Soul: Learning and the Origins of Consciousness' of Simona Ginsburg & Eva Jablonka for an example of how a true scientific account of the evolution of agency could be written. It also struck me that Tomasello often names learning as crucial in his early chapters - thus confirming at least a part of Ginsburg & Jablonka's thesis - but not once does he engage in the biological pathways of learning, nor how these neural pathways might have evolved.
A bit later in the book agency turns out to be about the capability of "choosing to act or not to act, or among multiple possible actions, according to its continuous perceptual assessment of the situation as it unfolds over time (sometimes employing executive processes such as inhibition, as a further control process, during action execution)." This is equated with behaving in "psychologically agentive ways".
2. The book is full of modifiers like 'mostly' and 'to some degree', but then fails to conceptually zoom in on what this actually means for the theory at hand. E.g., page 6:
"Tomesello and Call (1997) explicitly stated that things such as spiders building spiderwebs are interesting and complex phenomena, but they are not psychological, precisely because they are mostly not under the individual spider's flexible control. The concept of agency thus, in a sense, represents the dividing line between biological and psychological approaches to behavior; it is the distinction between complex behaviors designed and controlled by Nature, as it were, versus those designed and controlled, at least to some degree, by the individual psychological agent."
Note the words & phrases "mostly", "in a sense", "at least to some degree" and "as it were". Tomesello never specifies these further. Surely it is conceptually very important in which way the individual spider does flexibly control its weaving, as is implied by the use of the word "mostly"? Again, the dividing line between biology and psychology might be clear to Tomesello himself, but he doesn't manage to make it clear to the reader. At one hand, it seems to be something binary, a dichotomy ("a dividing line") but at the same time it isn't (a matter of "degree").
Another example of this page, on the wormlike C. elegans, page 29: "However, it is unlikely that there is also a comparison with some kind of internal goal to create direction: their locomotion is mostly random or stimulus driven. And these organisms do not seem to exhibit anything that we would want to call behavioral control: they do not inhibit or otherwise control action execution, and what they learn is simply the location toward which to direct their hardwired movements."
For starters, again, "mostly"? I would like to know more on that. Second, if they learn to direct themselves to food, at least part of their movements is not "hardwired" anymore, but goal directed, I would say. Tomasello never goes into the nuts and bolts of the distinction between goal-directed behavior, and stimulus driven behavior. It seems to me an internal goal (possibly accompanied by a conscious mental representation, as sometimes in humans) is a stimulus too. The fact that it is a stimulus originating from the neural systems inside the body does not feel so conceptually different from a neural stimulus that originates outside the body, as it only matters for the onset of the stimulus, not the resulting neural paths inside the body, i.e. not for the processing of the signal. Again, as for stimuli and different kinds of learning, I'd rather read another tome that has the same rigorousness as Ginsburg & Jablonka, than this short, breezy book.
When Tomasello also admits that this worm also knows how to avoid noxious chemicals, doesn't it have some kind of "inhibition" too, and thus forms of action control? What's the difference with the "feedback control organization" he talks about on the next page?
By the way, is the phrase "we would want to call" (my italics) a telltale?
3. Tomasello seems to think that "psychologically agentive species" somehow escape mechanic (neurological) pathways. He seems to forget that everything that happens in the brain, the neural system and the body is the result of molecular movement & energetic signals. Is he a closet Vitalist?
4. It seems to me that behavioral flexibility has not so much to do with agency, as Tomasello has it, but with the capacity for learning. Again, see Ginsburg & Jablonka.
5. On lizards, Tomasello introduces the concept of "go-no-go decisions", p. 39:
"Nevertheless, despite functioning as flexible decision-makers, goal-directed agents can make only simple decisions. They do not survey and choose among multiple behavioral possibilities simultaneously but rather move sequentially from one go-no-go decision to the next. This is to be expected of an organism whose behavior emanates exclusively from the single psychological tier of perception and action, rather than from, in addition, an executive tier of decision-making and cognitive control that formulates multiple action plans and then decides among them before acting, as do more complex agents."
My question here is what happens when a lizard perceives two fat insects slowly hovering in place within reach at about the same distance at the same time?
In the same chapter part of Tomasello's reasoning hinges on the fact that lizards might learn to eat a new insect because of "behavioral agency". It seems to me this kind of behavior has not a lot to do with agency at all. Why do lizards try to eat new insects? Simply because they resemble other insects. They have about the same size, they buzz, they have wings, they have six legs, etc. It seems to me that eating a new kind of insect is not new behavior at all, just the same behavior that operates on a slightly different kind of real world input (an hitherto unmet insect presents itself to the lizard), of which the slight difference does not matter to the lizard's internal decision process, more so, the lizard might not even register that slight difference. It's like certain geese that have been observed to roll back beer cans to their nests because they think the can is one of their eggs. Behavioral agency!
Because of examples like this, I decided to abandon the book 25% in. A go-no-go decision, or a form of inhibitory control? Either way, I'm pretty sure it wasn't a form agency: the decision kinda forced itself through my eyes into my brain.
More non-fiction review on Weighing A Pig Doesn't Fatten It
As a result, I decided to call it a day - even though, admittedly, the remaining chapters (about the agency of apes and humans) might play more into Tomasello's strengths. My loss, maybe, but I cannot but operate using inference if I read scientific books: if your base is brittle, I'm not going to risk dwelling in a superstructure that seems solid. It's a form a prejudice, yes, but my time is limited, and there's way too much else to read & learn.
A few examples/thoughts:
1. It starts with an unclear conception of 'agency' itself:
"Agency is thus not about all of the many and varied things that organisms do - from building anthills to caching nuts - but rather about how' they do them. Individuals acting as agents direct and control their won actions, whatever those actions may be specifically. The scientific challenge is to identify the underlying psychological organization that makes such individual direction and control possible."
It seems to me that the real scientific challenge is to identify the underlying neural pathways that guide our muscles to perform specific behavior. Tomasello is not clear at all about what "psychological" entails, and how that ties into neurology, biology & evolution. I would advice him to read 2019's 'The Evolution of the Sensitive Soul: Learning and the Origins of Consciousness' of Simona Ginsburg & Eva Jablonka for an example of how a true scientific account of the evolution of agency could be written. It also struck me that Tomasello often names learning as crucial in his early chapters - thus confirming at least a part of Ginsburg & Jablonka's thesis - but not once does he engage in the biological pathways of learning, nor how these neural pathways might have evolved.
A bit later in the book agency turns out to be about the capability of "choosing to act or not to act, or among multiple possible actions, according to its continuous perceptual assessment of the situation as it unfolds over time (sometimes employing executive processes such as inhibition, as a further control process, during action execution)." This is equated with behaving in "psychologically agentive ways".
2. The book is full of modifiers like 'mostly' and 'to some degree', but then fails to conceptually zoom in on what this actually means for the theory at hand. E.g., page 6:
"Tomesello and Call (1997) explicitly stated that things such as spiders building spiderwebs are interesting and complex phenomena, but they are not psychological, precisely because they are mostly not under the individual spider's flexible control. The concept of agency thus, in a sense, represents the dividing line between biological and psychological approaches to behavior; it is the distinction between complex behaviors designed and controlled by Nature, as it were, versus those designed and controlled, at least to some degree, by the individual psychological agent."
Note the words & phrases "mostly", "in a sense", "at least to some degree" and "as it were". Tomesello never specifies these further. Surely it is conceptually very important in which way the individual spider does flexibly control its weaving, as is implied by the use of the word "mostly"? Again, the dividing line between biology and psychology might be clear to Tomesello himself, but he doesn't manage to make it clear to the reader. At one hand, it seems to be something binary, a dichotomy ("a dividing line") but at the same time it isn't (a matter of "degree").
Another example of this page, on the wormlike C. elegans, page 29: "However, it is unlikely that there is also a comparison with some kind of internal goal to create direction: their locomotion is mostly random or stimulus driven. And these organisms do not seem to exhibit anything that we would want to call behavioral control: they do not inhibit or otherwise control action execution, and what they learn is simply the location toward which to direct their hardwired movements."
For starters, again, "mostly"? I would like to know more on that. Second, if they learn to direct themselves to food, at least part of their movements is not "hardwired" anymore, but goal directed, I would say. Tomasello never goes into the nuts and bolts of the distinction between goal-directed behavior, and stimulus driven behavior. It seems to me an internal goal (possibly accompanied by a conscious mental representation, as sometimes in humans) is a stimulus too. The fact that it is a stimulus originating from the neural systems inside the body does not feel so conceptually different from a neural stimulus that originates outside the body, as it only matters for the onset of the stimulus, not the resulting neural paths inside the body, i.e. not for the processing of the signal. Again, as for stimuli and different kinds of learning, I'd rather read another tome that has the same rigorousness as Ginsburg & Jablonka, than this short, breezy book.
When Tomasello also admits that this worm also knows how to avoid noxious chemicals, doesn't it have some kind of "inhibition" too, and thus forms of action control? What's the difference with the "feedback control organization" he talks about on the next page?
By the way, is the phrase "we would want to call" (my italics) a telltale?
3. Tomasello seems to think that "psychologically agentive species" somehow escape mechanic (neurological) pathways. He seems to forget that everything that happens in the brain, the neural system and the body is the result of molecular movement & energetic signals. Is he a closet Vitalist?
4. It seems to me that behavioral flexibility has not so much to do with agency, as Tomasello has it, but with the capacity for learning. Again, see Ginsburg & Jablonka.
5. On lizards, Tomasello introduces the concept of "go-no-go decisions", p. 39:
"Nevertheless, despite functioning as flexible decision-makers, goal-directed agents can make only simple decisions. They do not survey and choose among multiple behavioral possibilities simultaneously but rather move sequentially from one go-no-go decision to the next. This is to be expected of an organism whose behavior emanates exclusively from the single psychological tier of perception and action, rather than from, in addition, an executive tier of decision-making and cognitive control that formulates multiple action plans and then decides among them before acting, as do more complex agents."
My question here is what happens when a lizard perceives two fat insects slowly hovering in place within reach at about the same distance at the same time?
In the same chapter part of Tomasello's reasoning hinges on the fact that lizards might learn to eat a new insect because of "behavioral agency". It seems to me this kind of behavior has not a lot to do with agency at all. Why do lizards try to eat new insects? Simply because they resemble other insects. They have about the same size, they buzz, they have wings, they have six legs, etc. It seems to me that eating a new kind of insect is not new behavior at all, just the same behavior that operates on a slightly different kind of real world input (an hitherto unmet insect presents itself to the lizard), of which the slight difference does not matter to the lizard's internal decision process, more so, the lizard might not even register that slight difference. It's like certain geese that have been observed to roll back beer cans to their nests because they think the can is one of their eggs. Behavioral agency!
Because of examples like this, I decided to abandon the book 25% in. A go-no-go decision, or a form of inhibitory control? Either way, I'm pretty sure it wasn't a form agency: the decision kinda forced itself through my eyes into my brain.
More non-fiction review on Weighing A Pig Doesn't Fatten It
December 19, 2022
Michael Tomasello is an unusual scientist who does not shy away from the big questions. His new book is short and written with admirable clarity. He marshals both empirical and philosophical evidence to support his hypothesis on the evolution of agency in animals. Agency is the active approach that higher animals take to the problem of surviving. The paradigm of stimulus/response that is sometimes used to analyse this activity is hopelessly inadequate, in Tomasello's view. He posits a number of stages in the evolution of agency, where humans have reached the stage of socially normative agents, in which culture and norms are an essential part of our ecological niche.
A basic building block for all kinds of agency is the feedback control model. The organism has goals, and it monitors the environment and its own actions to improve the attainment of those goals. The basic driving force for the evolution of higher levels of agency was the increase in uncertainty in the environment due to competition and predation from other animals. A kind of arms race ensued. With each stage in the evolution of agency, another level of control is added at a higher level.
The first stage of agency involved flexible, context-sensitive behavior and learning, and involves attention to goal-relevant situations. The early vertebrates, modeled by current lizards, are hypothesized to have this level of goal-directed agency.
The next level, intentional agents, was probably reached by ancients mammals, corresponding to modern squirrels and rats. Due to increased competition with other goal-driven animals (including its own species and group), the ability to form a plan, an intention, evolved. This meant a degree of control of the lower-level goal-oriented behavior, adding more room for learning. An executive tier of decision-making and cognitive control was the means.
The third level reached by the ancient apes, probably similar to today's chimpanzees, was that of rational agents. By comparing plans and simulating in the mind various alternative actions, apes could begin to act logically and reflectively. The benefit to the individual was to understand how and why other individuals (conspecifics) acted as they did, and to anticipate their future moves. This required another executive tier, the reflective tier, which made it possible for apes to attribute mental states to others. An understanding of causality was also part of this development.
And finally, the fourth stage, ancient humans. Here new levels of social interaction, collaboration and competition became the driving force for development of joint agency in collaboration. Two persons agreeing to act together in a task, entailing commitment and role-taking. The collaboration of humans became obligate, i.e. it became a necessary mode of life. The selection for cooperatively competent and motivated individuals became very strong. Self-regulation in this social collaborative environment became essential, and the urge to make others conform developed as a response. Norms were born. Another level of executive control was added to regulate joint agency.
Culture, morality and collective agency thus evolved out of the need for better collaboration. "Human social relationships in general ... derive from the fundamentally cooperative nature of human social relationships." Once culture became important, it drove evolution by making cultural groups into coherent units of natural selection. Modern cultural groups have become collective agencies. This in turn explains the very strong in-group/out-group psychology of humans.
The need to look out for our individual interests, at the same time as we want to collaborate with others, is the fundamental reason why we humans experience true moral conflicts. We inhabit an objective-normative world, where norms are human creations, and yet have objective existence.
I find Michael Tomasello's hypothesis to be bold and extremely interesting. It makes sense of, and puts into perspective, the importance that norms and culture have for humans. The role of evolutionary thinking in social, political and ethical thinking is clearly growing.
A basic building block for all kinds of agency is the feedback control model. The organism has goals, and it monitors the environment and its own actions to improve the attainment of those goals. The basic driving force for the evolution of higher levels of agency was the increase in uncertainty in the environment due to competition and predation from other animals. A kind of arms race ensued. With each stage in the evolution of agency, another level of control is added at a higher level.
The first stage of agency involved flexible, context-sensitive behavior and learning, and involves attention to goal-relevant situations. The early vertebrates, modeled by current lizards, are hypothesized to have this level of goal-directed agency.
The next level, intentional agents, was probably reached by ancients mammals, corresponding to modern squirrels and rats. Due to increased competition with other goal-driven animals (including its own species and group), the ability to form a plan, an intention, evolved. This meant a degree of control of the lower-level goal-oriented behavior, adding more room for learning. An executive tier of decision-making and cognitive control was the means.
The third level reached by the ancient apes, probably similar to today's chimpanzees, was that of rational agents. By comparing plans and simulating in the mind various alternative actions, apes could begin to act logically and reflectively. The benefit to the individual was to understand how and why other individuals (conspecifics) acted as they did, and to anticipate their future moves. This required another executive tier, the reflective tier, which made it possible for apes to attribute mental states to others. An understanding of causality was also part of this development.
And finally, the fourth stage, ancient humans. Here new levels of social interaction, collaboration and competition became the driving force for development of joint agency in collaboration. Two persons agreeing to act together in a task, entailing commitment and role-taking. The collaboration of humans became obligate, i.e. it became a necessary mode of life. The selection for cooperatively competent and motivated individuals became very strong. Self-regulation in this social collaborative environment became essential, and the urge to make others conform developed as a response. Norms were born. Another level of executive control was added to regulate joint agency.
Culture, morality and collective agency thus evolved out of the need for better collaboration. "Human social relationships in general ... derive from the fundamentally cooperative nature of human social relationships." Once culture became important, it drove evolution by making cultural groups into coherent units of natural selection. Modern cultural groups have become collective agencies. This in turn explains the very strong in-group/out-group psychology of humans.
The need to look out for our individual interests, at the same time as we want to collaborate with others, is the fundamental reason why we humans experience true moral conflicts. We inhabit an objective-normative world, where norms are human creations, and yet have objective existence.
I find Michael Tomasello's hypothesis to be bold and extremely interesting. It makes sense of, and puts into perspective, the importance that norms and culture have for humans. The role of evolutionary thinking in social, political and ethical thinking is clearly growing.
August 26, 2023
This was a fascinating read and well recommended. Tomasello offers an account of what the basis for agency is, how it organized and evolved from lizards to modern day humans. He kept to a broad focus on the overall organization and development of agency, focusing on key points in our evolutionary history.
The most interesting chapter for me was chapter 6, Ancient Humans as Socially Normative Agents, particularly in the subsections when he discusses modern humans in how we socially construct and maintain our separate and integrated modes of agency - the individual "I", the collective "We" and the role of "Me". Also fascinating in this section was his explanation of our evolved capacity for shared agencies and our development of the shared construct of objective reality.
His last chapter summarizes his main thesis quite well - that agency was selected for and evolved with greater complexity and integration, involving integrated tiers of feedback control mechanisms, for improved behavioral flexibility in response to greater environmental uncertainties.
My only issue is his inaccurate characterization that behaviorism met its demise with its' overly simplistic stimulus-response model. That's old school behaviorism, not modern-day behavioral science.
The most interesting chapter for me was chapter 6, Ancient Humans as Socially Normative Agents, particularly in the subsections when he discusses modern humans in how we socially construct and maintain our separate and integrated modes of agency - the individual "I", the collective "We" and the role of "Me". Also fascinating in this section was his explanation of our evolved capacity for shared agencies and our development of the shared construct of objective reality.
His last chapter summarizes his main thesis quite well - that agency was selected for and evolved with greater complexity and integration, involving integrated tiers of feedback control mechanisms, for improved behavioral flexibility in response to greater environmental uncertainties.
My only issue is his inaccurate characterization that behaviorism met its demise with its' overly simplistic stimulus-response model. That's old school behaviorism, not modern-day behavioral science.
July 26, 2024
Before reading this book, I was concerned that agency is an ill-defined and dubiously applied concept in animal behavior. Upon completion, I still can not give a concise explicit definition of what 'agency' is, and am not convinced that it adds anything to current perspectives on ethology. Rather, 'agency' seems to take concepts already well incorporated into evolutionary biology and rebrands them under a confusing new name.
As an evolutionary biologist, I'm also obliged to state that considering modern lizards, modern squirrels, and modern great apes to be on 'a direct lineage toward humans' belies a deep misunderstanding of phylogenetics.
As an evolutionary biologist, I'm also obliged to state that considering modern lizards, modern squirrels, and modern great apes to be on 'a direct lineage toward humans' belies a deep misunderstanding of phylogenetics.
November 7, 2022
Bravo Tomasello. Another brilliant essay.
June 23, 2025
Interesting little read. Can't stop looking at the cat and wondering what's happening in that little head
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews