Michael Tomasello


Michael Tomasello is an American developmental and comparative psychologist, as well as a linguist. He is co-director of Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, co-director of the Wolfgang Kohler Primate Research Center, honorary professor at University of Leipzig and at Manchester University's Department of Psychology, and professor of psychology at Duke University.
Earning many prizes and awards from the end of the 1990s onward, he is considered one of today's most authoritative developmental and comparative psychologists. He is "one of the few scientists worldwide who is acknowledged as an expert in multiple disciplines". His "pioneering research on the origins of social cognition has led to revolutionary insights in both developmental psychology and primate cognition."

Early life and education

Tomasello was born in Bartow, Florida. He received his bachelor's degree 1972 from Duke University and his doctorate in Experimental Psychology 1980 from University of Georgia.

Career

He was a professor of psychology and anthropology at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, US, during the 1980s and 1990s. Subsequently, he moved to Germany to work at the Max Planck Institute.
He works on child language acquisition as a crucially important aspect of the enculturation process. He is a critic of Noam Chomsky's universal grammar, rejecting the idea of an innate universal grammar and instead proposing a functional theory of language development in which children learn linguistic structures through intention-reading and pattern-finding in their discourse interactions with others.
Tomasello also studies broader cognitive skills in a comparative light at the Wolfgang Köhler Primate Research Center in Leipzig. With his research team, he created a set of experimental devices to test toddlers' and apes' spatial, instrumental, and social cognition; the outcome of which is that social cognition is what truly sets human apart.

Uniqueness of human social cognition: broad outlines

More specifically, Tomasello argues that apes lack a series of skills:
Tomasello sees these skills as being preceded and encompassed by the capacity to share attention and intention, an evolutionary novelty that would have emerged as a cooperative integrating of apes skills that formerly worked in competition.

The sharing of attention and of intention

Inferring a common need, being motivated to act cooperatively to fulfill this need, coordinating individuals' roles and perspectives under the common goal of fulfilling this common need if, and only if other agent fulfill his commitment toward that goal, and sharing the spoils fairly ; thus can be defined the overall scheme of the sharing of attention and of intention. Tomasello holds such dual structure of commonality and individuality as being a cognitive integration of skills in mind reading, in instrumental action and in simulational thinking. Individuals need to make clear or explicit, by eye contact, by gestural pantomime or else, that they intend to coordinate their actions and perspectives under a common goal. Communicating such a specific intent suggest agents can entertain a sense of forming a "we", to which they feel a sense of commitment, such that defecting from collaborating require an apology or a taking leave. Collaborative agents also see their interaction through a representational format amounting to a bird's eye view or view from nowhere, as suggested by their skills at role switching with their partner, and at inferring what is helpful or relevant to help their partner play their role.
Tomasello's defense, use and deepening of the shared attention and intention hypothesis rely on the experimental data asserted to above. Tomasello also resorts to an evolutionary two-step scenario, and to philosophical concepts borrowed from Paul Grice, John Searle, Margaret Gilbert, Michael Bratman, and anthropologist Dan Sperber.
At one point in time, after the emergence of the genus Homo two millions years ago, Homo Heidelbergensis or other close candidate became obligate foragers and scavengers under ecological pressures driving to resources scarcity. Individuals able to avoid free-riders and to divide the spoils with collaborative partners would have gain an adaptive advantage over non cooperators. The heightened dependence on joint effort to gain food and the social selection of partners are taken to account for an evolution toward better skills at coordinating individual's roles and perspectives under a common attentional frame and under a common goal, giving rise to joint, interpersonal intention. Later, around 200 000 years ago,, new ecological pressures presumably posed by competition within groups put those comprising "loose pool" of collaborators at a disadvantage against groups of coherently collaborative individuals working for a common territorial defense. "Individuals began to understand themselves as members of particular social group with a particular identity"..
For Tomasello, this two-step evolutionary path of macro ecological pressures impacting micro-level skills in representation, inferences and self-monitoring, does not hold because natural selection would see internal mechanisms. « Cognitive processes are a product of natural selection, but they are not its target. Indeed, natural selection cannot even see cognition; it can only see the effects of cognition in organizing and regulating overt actions ».. Ecological pressures would have put prior cooperative or mutualistic behaviors at such an advantage against competition as to create a new selective pressure favoring new cognitive skills, which would have posed new challenges, in an autocatalytic way.
Echoing the phylogenetic path, humans' unique skills at joint and collective intentionality develop during the individual's lifetime by scaffolding, not only on simple skills like distinguishing animate/inanimate matter, but also on the communicative conventions and institutions forming the socio-cultural environment, forming feedback loops that enrich and deepen both cultural ground and individual's prior skills. "asic skills evolve phylogenetically, enabling the creation of cultural products historically, which then provide developing children with the biological and cultural tools they need to develop ontogenetically".
The sharing of attention and of intention is taken to be prior to language in evolutionary time and in an individual's lifetime, while conditioning language's acquisition through the parsing of joint attentional scenes into actors, objects, events and the like. More broadly, Tomasello sees the sharing of attention and of intention as the roots of human cultural world : ""Human reasoning, even when it is done internally with the self, is shot through and through with a kind of collective normativity in which the individuals regulate her actions and thinking based on the group's normative conventions and standards".

Awards