Mike Tomasello on Shared Intentionality, Cooperation, and Human Uniqueness
Hidden Theme: Cooperation for Social Good
Cooperation, not individual strength, is the fundamental driver of human success.
This contrasts human capabilities with other species (e.g., “slower than tigers and weaker than elephants").
Cooperative advantage allows humans to thrive in diverse environments and overcome physical limitations.
Highly organized collective action and division of labor lead to unprecedented societal complexity.
Cooperation is a core social good, influencing:
Biology: Physiological adaptations for social living, such as:
Prolonged period of immaturity requiring extended, cooperative parental and alloparental care.
Hormonal responses (e.g., oxytocin) facilitating bonding, empathy, and prosocial behavior.
Cognition: Specialized mechanisms, such as:
Joint attention allowing explicit sharing of mental states and experiences.
Sophisticated 'theory of mind' to understand and predict others' intentions and beliefs for shared goals.
Capacity for recursive thought.
Culture: Creation and transmission of:
Shared rituals.
Complex knowledge systems.
Moral norms.
Cumulative technological advancements passed across generations through teaching and imitation.
Institutions: Establishment of:
Legal systems for justice and order.
Educational structures for transmitting cumulative knowledge.
Economic systems for resource distribution.
Governance bodies that organize collective efforts and maintain social cohesion.
While counterforces like competition and conflict exist (often within cooperative frameworks, e.g., competitive sports), the primary emphasis is on cooperation as the defining and most impactful human characteristic.
Cooperation is crucial for the development of complex societies, symbolic communication, and cumulative culture.
Key book: "Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny."
Serves as the title of his keynote presentation.
Encapsulates his latest theoretical framework on human development and the emergence of human-unique capacities.
Synthesizes decades of his research and offers a comprehensive model.
Core questions and scope
What do individuals bring to the process of cultural institutions and symbols?
Probes innate, developmental, and acquired capacities enabling engagement with complex cultural phenomena.
Takes an ontogenetic perspective, focusing on how abilities unfold from early infancy through childhood.
Considers predispositions for social learning, empathy, prosocial behavior, and shared attention.
Explores how these foundational capacities contribute to conventionalizing shared practices and creating symbolic artifacts.
What does participating in culture (including linguistic communication and education) do to human ontogeny?
Explores the reciprocal relationship: how active engagement with cultural practices shapes cognitive, social, and emotional development.
Examples:
Language alters thought processes (categorization, abstraction).
Formal education cultivates executive functions, critical thinking, and abstract reasoning.
Using cultural tools (numbers, maps, calendars) reorganizes perception and interaction with the world.
Leads to sophisticated self-regulation and agency within a social normative structure.
A strong emphasis is placed on a comparative approach.
Uses meticulous observations and controlled experiments with primate relatives (great apes).
Systematically identifies uniquely human psychological traits/behaviors vs. those shared with great apes.
This phylogenetic perspective illuminates evolutionary pathways of human-specific capacities.
Helps distinguish between evolved predispositions and culturally constructed traits.
Provides insights into the precise nature of the 'human-ape divide' in social cognition.
Culture and cultural evolution (the big picture)
Tomasello posits that culture and cultural evolution are novel, powerful processes influencing biological evolution (gene-culture co-evolution).
Unlike genetic evolution (long timescales, random mutation, natural selection), cultural evolution allows:
Rapid, flexible, and cumulative transmission of knowledge, skills, and practices.
Quicker adaptation and innovation within a species' lifespan.
Complex technologies, symbol systems (like language), and social institutions (laws, religions, governments) are fundamentally collective products.
Built by groups of humans working together.
Rely on individuals collaborating, sharing goals and efforts, and effectively transmitting knowledge across generations.
Ensures continuous progress and the formation of a "collective brain" where knowledge is distributed and refined.
Symbolic communication enables abstract thought and external storage/manipulation of information beyond individual memory.
Cultural time is characterized as both cumulative and ratcheting.
Accumulated knowledge, skills, and innovations are preserved, learned, and serve as a foundation for further improvements.
Each generation inherits, refines, reorganizes, and adds to predecessors' accomplishments.
Leads to a steady, upward progression of complexity and sophistication.
The 'ratchet effect' prevents cultural loss and fuels exponential growth in knowledge and technology, differentiating human cumulative culture from non-cumulative 'traditions' in non-human primates.
Comparative lens: humans vs. great apes
A central tenet: distinct and profound difference between humans and great apes (especially chimpanzees) regarding social coordination.
For collaboration, communication, and social learning.
Humans possess highly sophisticated psychological mechanisms (e.g., true imitation of intentions, active teaching, shared goals).
These mechanisms are not built comparably in great apes.
Suggests a unique evolutionary trajectory for human sociality rooted in a deeper capacity for 'shared intentionality'.
While great apes show impressive cognitive abilities (tool use, causal problem-solving, understanding simple intentions), Tomasello highlights significant limitations in human-like social coordination.
Chimpanzees often cooperate for personal gain (e.g., accessing food, outcompeting rivals), not genuine shared goals where all benefit mutually.
Exhibit less complex forms of joint attention.
Rarely engage in active teaching (modifying behavior for student's benefit, even at cost).
Social learning often relies more on emulation (copying outcomes) than true imitation (copying specific actions and underlying intentions).
The 9 \text{-month} revolution: onset of human-specific social engagement
Core claim: Ontogenetic roots of human-unique social coordination begin around 9 \text{-months} of age.
This period marks a qualitative shift in infant social cognition.
Infants begin to engage in genuinely triadic interactions.
During this critical developmental window (approx. 9 \text{-12} months), three foundational behaviors emerge in triadic interactions (infant, social partner, external object/event):
Joint attention: Infant actively coordinates attention with a social partner toward an external object or event.
Characterized by mutual understanding and explicit signaling (gaze alternation, pointing, vocalizations) of sharing attention.
Forms the basis for later language acquisition, understanding conventional symbols, and inferring others' mental states.
Social engagement: Infant engages with another person cooperatively and intersubjectively.
Includes initiating social interactions (proto-declarative/imperative pointing), reciprocating emotional expressions (social smiling, vocalizations), and actively soliciting shared experiences.
Early forms of collaboration: Simple turn-taking and reciprocal actions contingent on partner’s reactions, often around a concrete joint activity.
Examples: rolling a ball, building blocks, peek-a-boo.
Demonstrates nascent understanding of shared goals and mutual benefit, where each action depends on partner's previous action.
Demonstrations often include short home movies illustrating infants' active engagement, coordinating actions, and sharing emotional states with caregivers.
Provide compelling empirical evidence for these emerging capacities that set humans apart from other primates.
Early empirical observations and the eye-tracking distinction
Eye-gaze and monitoring are distinctively human; humans are unique in advertising where they are looking via the visible sclera.
Overt anatomical and behavioral signaling of gaze direction facilitates cooperative joint attention.
Fosters mutual understanding, efficient social coordination, and information exchange.
Part of the 'cooperative eye hypothesis'.
Crucial comparative note on eye direction (morphology and behavior):
Humans: Unique eye morphology (large, visible white sclera contrasting with iris).
Clearly advertise eye direction with high precision.
Actively reference each other’s subtle eye movements as direct, unambiguous cues for shared interest and intention.
Enables rapid and complex non-verbal communication.
Non-human primates (e.g., chimpanzees):
Gaze following relies almost exclusively on head orientation.
Eyes are often darker with smaller/less visible sclera, making gaze direction less obvious.
Significantly limits precision and ease of establishing joint attention via eye movements, impeding fine-grained social coordination.
Two key empirical contrasts:
While chimpanzees primarily follow head movement to infer focus, human children (even from 6 \text{-12} months) explicitly follow the eyes themselves.
Demonstrates unique sensitivity to visual attention direction, even without concomitant head turns.
This difference supports the hypothesis that the human visual system (especially expressive eyes) evolved as an adaptation to cooperative environments.
In such environments, mutual monitoring and precise shared attention are essential for successful collaboration, sophisticated gestural communication, and efficient social learning.
Lays groundwork for unique human pro-social behaviors and cultural learning.
Shared intentionality and the cognitive architecture
Tomasello's model proposes a sophisticated two-level structure linking observable behavior with underlying cognition:
Behavioral level: Involves a joint goal with clear role assignment.
Individuals understand the overarching goal (e.g., building a tower, foraging) and their specific, complementary roles (e.g., "you roll the ball to me; I catch it").
Each participant understands their interdependent part contributing to the larger cooperative endeavor.
Forms a 'we-intention' and holds mutual expectations for each other's actions.
Cognitive level: Encompasses joint attention and perspectival recursive cognition.
Joint attention: Shared focus on an object or event, acting as a mental scaffold.
Perspectival recursive cognition: Advanced human ability to engage with others by adopting, comparing, and integrating multiple perspectives on the same item within a cooperative frame.
Capacity to understand what I see/know, and critically, what you see/know, and how perspectives relate to a shared reality or goal.
Allows constructing a robust, mutually understood shared mental representation, vital for communication, teaching, and complex collective problem-solving.
Perspectival recursive cognition is the advanced ability to think about something while simultaneously considering how another person is thinking about it, or how it is viewed from multiple viewpoints.
Allows individuals to construct a shared understanding or a “bird’s-eye-view” that transcends any single individual's perspective.
Enables complex communication, teaching, moral reasoning, and negotiation of shared norms.
Example: Understanding a partner might interpret a gesture differently based on their experience; knowing a shared tool needs specific orientation for mutual accessibility.
Contrasts starkly with ape performance: while apes follow gaze and understand simple intentions, they don't typically describe, compare, or integrate multiple perspectives from an executive, objective, or "bird’s-eye-view" level, which is crucial for complex human collaboration and communication.
Core concepts and terminology
Shared intentionality: Overarching concept describing the uniquely human capacity for coordinating mental states (goals, intentions, attention, knowledge) and actions with others in a social context.
Fundamentally about a 'we-ness' in thinking and acting.
Forms the bedrock for human culture, language, and moral systems.
Joint intentionality (dyadic): Refers to collaborative activities between two individuals around a concrete, joint goal.
Accompanied by mutual awareness of each other’s intentions, roles, and contributions.
Mutual awareness and commitment to a shared goal form the foundation of dyadic cooperation, with interdependent actions.
Collective intentionality (group-level): Extends joint intentionality to a larger scale, encompassing shared norms, conventions, and language governing group behavior and interactions.
Involves a sense of group identity, shared moral obligations, and creation of cultural common ground.
Dictates how individuals behave within their community, leading to institutions, rituals, and complex social structures that transcend individual dyadic interactions.