M Tomasello
Biographic Data
| ID | 65455 |
|---|---|
| NAME | M Tomasello |
| GIVEN NAMES | M |
| FAMILY NAME | Tomasello |
| SIGNATURE | TOMASELLO M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1649-088X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 230 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1115 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 228 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1983 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 18 |
The evolutionary psychology of the human pointing gesture
The human pointing gesture is a species‐unique and species‐universal form of communication that depends on humans' especially powerful forms of cooperative cognition and motivation. I have previously hypothesized that the pointing gesture evolved as a behavioral tool empowering individuals to better coordinate their interdependent collaborative activities by informing one another of things helpfully. Here I provide new data in support of this hyp…
A Shared Intentionality Account of Uniquely Human Social Bonding
Many mechanisms of social bonding are common to all primates, but humans seemingly have developed some that are unique to the species. These involve various kinds of interactive experiences—from taking a walk together to having a conversation—whose common feature is the triadic sharing of experience. Current theories of social bonding have no explanation for why humans should have these unique bonding mechanisms. Here we propose a shared intentio…
The evolutionary psychology of syntax
Linguists often characterize syntax in terms of combinatorial rules. But there is also a pragmatics to syntax in which communicators choose and tailor syntactic constructions for different communicative contexts. Great apes exposed to “language” combine elements creatively, but they show no skills in the pragmatics of syntax. In contrast, even before language begins, human infants engage with others in unique forms of cooperative communication vi…
Specifically human culture: Response to Baumard & André
O papel da ontogenia na evolução da cooperação humana
Para explicar a origem evolutiva de habilidades e motivações exclusivamente humanas para a cooperação, Tomasello et al. (2012) propuseram a hipótese da interdependência. O contexto adaptativo chave nesse relato foi o forrageamento colaborativo obrigatório de adultos humanos primitivos. Hawkes (2014), seguindo Hrdy (2009), forneceu um relato alternativo para o surgimento de habilidades cooperativas exclusivamente humanas em que a chave eram as ten…
Thought and language: Effects of group-mindedness on young children’s interpretation of exclusive we
The current study investigated whether age-related changes in the conceptualization of social groups influences interpretation of the pronoun we. Sixty-four 2- and 4-year-olds (N = 29 female, 50 White-identifying) viewed scenarios in which it was ambiguous how many puppets performed an activity together. When asked who performed the activity, a speaker puppet responded, “We did!” In one condition, the speaker was near one and distant from another…
Gender and cultural differences in the development of reciprocity in young children
A foundational mechanism underlying human cooperation is reciprocity. In the context of repeated interactions with others, it is not always clear the degree to which in-kind responses reflect responsiveness to partners' prior behaviors ("reactive" responses), an interest unrelated to the partner ("nonreactive" responses), or any combination of the two. To disentangle these two types of responses, we presented children with sequential, one-shot, a…
Just teasing! - Infants' and toddlers' understanding of teasing interactions and its effect on social bonding
Thought and language: Association of groupmindedness with young English-speaking children’s production of pronouns
Shared intentionality theory posits that at age 3, children expand their conception of plural agency to include 3- or more-person groups. We sought to determine whether this conceptual shift is detectable in children’s pronoun use. We report the results of a series of Bayesian hierarchical generative models fitted to 479 English-speaking children’s first-person plural, first-person singular, second-person, third-person plural, and third-person si…
Differences in the Social Motivations and Emotions of Humans and Other Great Apes
Humans share with other mammals and primates many social motivations and emotions, but they are also much more cooperative than even their closest primate relatives. Here I review recent comparative experiments and analyses that illustrate humans' species-typical social motivations and emotions for cooperation in comparison with those of other great apes. These may be classified most generally as (i) 'you > me' (e.g., prosocial sympathy, informat…
How fairness and dominance guide young children’s bargaining decisions
Reaching agreements in conflicts is an important developmental challenge. Here, German 5-year-olds (N = 284, 49% female, mostly White, mixed socioeconomic backgrounds; data collection: June 2016–November 2017) faced repeated face-to-face bargaining problems in which they chose between fair and unfair reward divisions. Across three studies, children mostly settled on fair divisions. However, dominant children tended to benefit more from bargaining…
The social-pragmatic theory of word learning
Some researchers have tried to explain early word learning via garden-variety learning processes and others by invoking linguistically specific “constraints” that help children to narrow down the referential possibilities. The social-pragmatic approach to word learning argues that children do not need specifically linguistic constraints to learn words, but rather what they need are flexible and powerful social-cognitive skills that allow them to …
What is it like to be a chimpanzee
Chimpanzees and humans are close evolutionary relatives who behave in many of the same ways based on a similar type of agentive organization. To what degree do they experience the world in similar ways as well? Using contemporary research in evolutionarily biology and animal cognition, I explicitly compare the kinds of experience the two species of capable of having. I conclude that chimpanzees’ experience of the world, their experiential niche a…
Response to: Rethinking Human Development and the Shared Intentionality Hypothesis
I respond to Moll, Nichols, and Mackey’s review of my book Becoming Human. I agree with many of their points, but have my own point of view on some others
Toddlers Prefer Adults as Informants: 2- And 3-Year-Olds’ Use of and Attention to Pointing Gestures From Peer and Adult Partners
Two- and 3-year-old children (N = 96) were tested in an object-choice task with video presentations of peer and adult partners. An immersive, semi-interactive procedure enabled both the close matching of adult and peer conditions and the combination of participants’ choice behavior with looking time measures. Children were more likely to use information provided by adults. As the effect was more pronounced in the younger age-group, the observed b…
Norms Require Not Just Technical Skill and Social Learning, but Real Cooperation
Birch’s account of the evolutionary origins of social norms is essentially individualistic. It begins with individuals regulating their own actions toward internally represented goals, as evaluative standards, and adds in a social dimension only secondarily. I argue that a better account begins at the outset with uniquely human collaborative activity in which individuals share evaluative standards about how anyone who would play a given role must…
Joint attention to mental content and the social origin of reasoning
Growing evidence indicates that our higher rational capacities depend on social interaction—that only through engaging with others do we acquire the ability to evaluate beliefs as true or false, or to reflect on and evaluate the reasons that support our beliefs. Up to now, however, we have had little understanding of how this works. Here we argue that a uniquely human socio-linguistic phenomenon which we call ‘joint attention to mental content’ (…
Communicating Without Conventions: The Co-operation Model
For obvious and very good reasons the study of human communication is dominated by the study of language. But from a psychological point of view, the basic structure of human communication - how it works pragmatically in terms of the intentions and inferences involved - is totally independent of language. The most important data here are acts of human communication that do not employ conventions. In situations in which language is for some reason…
The moral psychology of obligation
Although psychologists have paid scant attention to the sense of obligation as a distinctly human motivation, moral philosophers have identified two of its key features: First, it has a peremptory, demanding force, with a kind of coercive quality, and second, it is often tied to agreement-like social interactions (e.g., promises) in which breaches prompt normative protest, on the one side, and apologies, excuses, justifications, and guilt on the …
The development of intent-based moral judgment and moral behavior in the context of indirect reciprocity: A cross-cultural study
The current study aimed to investigate the cultural differences in the developmental origins of children’s intent-based moral judgment and moral behavior in the context of indirect reciprocity. To this end, we compared how German and Chinese children interpret and react to antisocial and prosocial interactions between puppets. An actor puppet performed either a positive or negative act toward a prosocial or antisocial target puppet with the inten…
Young Children’s Ability to Produce Valid and Relevant Counter-Arguments
In collaborative problem solving, children produce and evaluate arguments for proposals. We investigated whether 3- and 5-year-olds (N = 192) can produce and evaluate arguments against those arguments (i.e., counter-arguments). In Study 1, each child within a peer dyad was privately given a reason to prefer one over another solution to a task. One child, however, was given further information that would refute the reasoning of their partner. Five…
The development of coordination via joint expectations for shared benefits
People frequently need to cooperate despite having strong self-serving motives. In the current study, pairs of 5- and 7-year-olds ( N = 160) faced a one-shot coordination problem: To benefit, children had to choose the same of 3 reward divisions. They could not communicate or see each other and thus had to accurately predict each other's choices to succeed. One division split the rewards evenly, while the others each favored one child. Five-year-…
Early birds: Metaphor understanding in 3-year-olds
Chimpanzees and children avoid mutual defection in a social dilemma
Chimpanzees use observed temporal directionality to learn novel causal relations
We investigated whether chimpanzees use the temporal sequence of external events to determine causation. Seventeen chimpanzees ( Pan troglodytes ) witnessed a human experimenter press a button in two different conditions. When she pressed the “causal button” the delivery of juice and a sound immediately followed (cause-then-effect). In contrast, she pressed the “non-causal button” only after the delivery of juice and sound (effect-then-cause). Wh…
Two Key Steps in the Evolution of Human Cooperation: The Interdependence Hypothesis
Modern theories of the evolution of human cooperation focus mainly on altruism. In contrast, we propose that humans' species-unique forms of cooperation-as well as their species-unique forms of cognition, communication, and social life-all derive from mutualistic collaboration (with social selection against cheaters). In a first step, humans became obligate collaborative foragers such that individuals were interdependent with one another and so h…
The Human Adaptation for Culture
Human beings are biologically adapted for culture in ways that other primates are not, as evidenced most clearly by the fact that only human cultural traditions accumulate modifications over historical time (the ratchet effect). The key adaptation is one that enables individuals to understand other individuals as intentional agents like the self. This species-unique form of social cognition emerges in human ontogeny at approximately 1 year of age…
Chimpanzee and Human Cultures
Culture has traditionally been attributed only to human beings. Despite growing evidence of behavioral diversity in wild chimpanzee populations, most anthropologists and psychologists still deny culture to this animal species. We argue here that culture is not monolithic but a set of processes. These processes show much diversity both in the social norms and models that determine which individuals will be exposed to particular cultural variants a…
Joint music making promotes prosocial behavior in 4-year-old children☆☆☆
The sources of normativity: Young children's awareness of the normative structure of games
In two studies, the authors investigated 2- and 3-year-old children's awareness of the normative structure of conventional games. In the target conditions, an experimenter showed a child how to play a simple rule game. After the child and the experimenter had played for a while, a puppet came (controlled by a 2nd experimenter), asked to join in, and then performed an action that constituted a mistake in the game. In control conditions, the puppet…
Sympathy through affective perspective taking and its relation to prosocial behavior in toddlers
In most research on the early ontogeny of sympathy, young children are presented with an overtly distressed person and their responses are observed. In the current study, the authors asked whether young children could also sympathize with a person to whom something negative had happened but who was expressing no emotion at all. They showed 18- and 25-month-olds an adult either harming another adult by destroying or taking away her possessions (ha…
Extrinsic rewards undermine altruistic tendencies in 20-month-olds
The current study investigated the influence of rewards on very young children's helping behavior. After 20-month-old infants received a material reward during a treatment phase, they subsequently were less likely to engage in further helping during a test phase as compared with infants who had previously received social praise or no reward at all. This so-called overjustification effect suggests that even the earliest helping behaviors of young …
Two-year-old children's production of multiword utterances: A usage-based analysis
Children generate novel utterances from the outset of multiword speech. In this study, we apply a usage-based method called 'traceback' to the multiword utterances of four two-year-olds to see how closely related these utterances are to their previous utterances. Data was collected from the age of 2;0 until 6 weeks later on a relatively dense sampling schedule. We attempted to match each novel multiword utterance in a two-hour corpus to lexical s…
Understanding attention: 12- And 18-Month-Olds Know What Is New for Other Persons
Infants at 12 and 18 months of age played with 2 adults and 2 new toys. For a 3rd toy, however, 1 of the adults left the room while the child and the other adult played with it. This adult then returned, looked at all 3 toys aligned on a tray, showed great excitement ("Wow! Cool!"), and then asked, "Can you give it to me?' To retrieve the toy the adult wanted, infants had to (a) know that people attend to and get excited about new things and (b) …
Reliance on head versus eyes in the gaze following of great apes and human infants: The Cooperative Eye Hypothesis
The ultra‐social animal
In evolutionary perspective, what is most remarkable about human sociality is its many and diverse forms of cooperation. Here, I provide an overview of some recent research, mostly from our laboratory, comparing human children with their nearest living relatives, the great apes, in various tests of collaboration, prosocial behavior, conformity, and group‐mindedness (e.g., following and enforcing social norms). This is done in the context of a hyp…
Young children’s understanding of joint commitments
When adults make a joint commitment to act together, they feel an obligation to their partner. In 2 studies, the authors investigated whether young children also understand joint commitments to act together. In the first study, when an adult orchestrated with the child a joint commitment to play a game together and then broke off from their joint activity, 3-year-olds (n = 24) reacted to the break significantly more often (e.g., by trying to re-e…
Young children learn to produce passives with nonce verbs
Younger and older children (mean ages = 2 years 11 months and 3 years 5 months) learned 2 nonce verbs in a full passive or active transitive construction. When asked patient-focused questions encouraging passive-voice replies (e.g., "What happened to the ball?") or agent-focused questions encouraging active-voice replies (e.g., "What did Elmo do?"), children used a variety of strategies to meet the demands of the questions, usually without changi…
Young children's productivity with word order and verb morphology
Four studies examined English-speaking children's productivity with word order and verb morphology. Two- and 3-year-olds were taught novel transitive verbs with experimentally controlled argument structures. The younger children neither used nor comprehended word order with these verbs; older children comprehended and used word order correctly to mark agents and patients of the novel verbs. Children as young as 2 years 1 month added -ing but not …
Learning words in nonostensive contexts
Four word learning studies with 24-month-old children are reported. In Studies 1 and 2, an adult used a novel word to announce her intention to perform an action or to find an object. It was found that a knowledge of what action or object was impending ― established through scripted events before the word's introduction ― was not necessary for children to learn the words. Studies 3 and 4 focused on what word learning cues children might be using …
The social bases of language acquisition
A language is composed of conventional symbols shaped by their social‐communicative functions. Children acquire these symbols, both lexical and syntactic, in the context of culturally constituted event structures that make salient these functions. In the acquisition process children rely on cultural learning skills (i.e., imitative learning). These skills emanate from their ability to participate intersubjectively with adults in cultural activiti…
Unwilling Versus Unable: Infants' Understanding of Intentional Action
Infants experienced a female adult handling them toys. Sometimes, however, the transaction failed, either because the adult was in various ways unwilling to give the toy (e.g., she teased the child with it or played with it herself) or else because she was unable to give it (e.g., she accidentally dropped it). Infants at 9, 12, and 18 months of age reacted with more impatience (e.g., reaching, looking away) when the adult was unwilling to give th…
The acquisition of finite complement clauses in English: A corpus-based analysis
This article examines the development of finite complement clauses in the speech of seven English-speaking children aged 1;2 to 5;2. It shows that in most of children's complex utterances that seem to include a finite complement clause, the main clause does not express a full proposition; rather, it functions as an epistemic marker, attention getter, or marker of illocutionary force. The whole construction thus contains only a single proposition …
Tools, Language and Cognition in Human Evolution
Tools, Language and Cognition in Human Evolution. Kathleen R. Gibson and Tim Ingold. eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. 483 pp
Two-year-olds learn novel nouns, verbs, and conventional actions from massed or distributed exposures
Two-year-old children were taught either 6 novel nouns, 6 novel verbs, or 6 novel actions over 1 month. In each condition, children were exposed to some items in massed presentations (on a single day) and some in distributed presentations (over the 2 weeks). Children's comprehension and production was tested at 3 intervals after training. In comprehension, children learned all types of items in all training conditions at all retention intervals. …
Transactive discussions with peers and adults
The roots of human altruism
Human infants as young as 14 to 18 months of age help others attain their goals, for example, by helping them to fetch out-of-reach objects or opening cabinets for them. They do this irrespective of any reward from adults (indeed external rewards undermine the tendency), and very likely with no concern for such things as reciprocation and reputation, which serve to maintain altruism in older children and adults. Humans' nearest primate relatives,…
Observational learning of tool-use by young chimpanzees
A New Look at the Acquisition of Relative Clauses
This study reconsiders the acquisition of relative clauses based on data from two sentencerepetition tasks. Usingmaterials modeled on the relative constructions of spontaneous child speech, we asked four-year-old English- and German-speaking children to repeat six different types of relative clauses. Although English and German relative clauses are structurally very different, the results were similar across studies: intransitive subject relative…
Meritocratic sharing is based on collaboration in 3-year-olds
The present study investigated young preschoolers' proportional allocation of rewards in 2 different work contexts. We presented 32 pairs of 3.5-year-old peers with a collaborative task to obtain rewards by pulling ropes. In order to establish differences in work input, 1 child's rope was not immediately accessible but had to be retrieved from the apparatus by means of a specific tool, while the other child had no such additional work to do. The …
Joint attention and lexical acquisition style
Recent research has documented systematic individual differences in early lexical development. The current study investigated the relation ship of these differences to differences in the way mothers and children regulate each other's attentional states. Mothers of 6 one-year-olds kept diary records and were videotaped with their children at monthly intervals as well. Language measures from the diary were related to measures of attention manipulat…
Cognitive bases of lexical development: Object permanence and relational words
The hypothesis that there is a close relationship between object permanence and early language acquisition has not been supported by most previous research. McCune-Nicolich (1981), however, performed a detailed theoretical analysis and, as a result, found a close relationship between stage 6 object permanence development and the use of relational words. Unlike previous studies which used mostly quantitative measures of language, McCune-Nicolich r…
Young children's coordination of gestural and linguistic reference
The current study investigated the relationship between young children's linguistic and nonlinguistic communicative strategies. Twenty-three children, 20-44 months of age, served as subjects. In a naturalistic setting, an adult gave signs of noncomprehension (a contingent query) to each of the child's object references. The child's original linguistic reference and use of gestures were recorded and compared to his/her subsequent linguistic and ge…
The development of gestural communication in young chimpanzees
Joint Attention and Early Language
Object permanence and relational words: A lexical training study
Observational/correlational research has established that children in stage 5 object permanence development use words that refer to the visible movement of objects, while it is not until stage 6 that they use words referring to the invisible movement of objects (e.g. gone ). It is not clear, however, whether the cognitive competence evidenced by performance in the object permanence task is a prerequisite for these linguistic productions or whethe…
Young children's responses to neutral and specific contingent queries
This study examined young children's responses to adult contingent queries. Each of 22 children in Language Stages II–V conversed alone with their mother and alone with an adult experimenter. The adults queried the child's multi-word utterances with either a neutral or a specific query. Children at all stages responded differently to the two types of query. In response to the neutral query children tended to repeat their entire utterance, whereas…
Transactive discussions with peers and adults
Linguistic environment of 1- to 2-year-old twins
The current study investigated differences in the language learning environments of singletons and twins, with special reference to pragmatic factors that might be expected to differ in dyadic and triadic interactive situations. Six twin pairs and 12 singleton children (all firstborn) were observed in natural interactions with their mothers, once at 15 months of age and again at 21 months of age. Twins were lower than singletons on all measures o…
Learning to use prepositions: A case study
The current study documented one child's earliest use of prepositions during her second year of life. The spatial oppositions up-down, on-off, in—out and over—under were first to be learned. These words were all used initially in non-prepositional senses (mostly as holophrastic, verb-like requests for activities) prior to prepositional usage. They were seldom omitted or misused. The prepositions with, by, to, for, at and of were learned later. Fo…
Observational learning of tool-use by young chimpanzees
The effect of previously learned words on the child's acquisition of words for similar referents
The current study assessed the child's learning of an object label in two conditions: when its referent was highly similar and when its referent was highly dissimilar to the referent of a known child word. Twenty-two 2-year-old children were taught the name for an object. In a session several days subsequent, they were taught names for two new objects: one which was highly similar and one which was highly dissimilar to the referent of the word le…
The role of joint attentional processes in early language development
A longitudinal investigation of gestural communication in young chimpanzees
Young children's conversations with their mothers and fathers: Differences in breakdown and repair
In this study we compared the conversations of mothers and fathers with their children at 1;3 and 159, with special attention to breakdown-repair sequences. We found that, overall, children and secondary caregiver fathers experienced more communicative breakdowns than did children and primary caregiver mothers. More specifically, fathers requested clarification of their children more often than did mothers, and they most often used a non-specific…
First Verbs: A Case Study of Early Grammatical Development
During the second year of his daughter's life, Michael Tomasello kept a detailed diary of her language, creating a rich database. He made a careful study of how she acquired her first verbs and analysed the role that verbs played in her early grammatical development. Using a Cognitive Linguistics framework, the author argues persuasively that the child's earliest grammatical organization is verb-specific (the Verb Island hypothesis). He argues fu…
Joint attention on actions: Acquiring verbs in ostensive and non-ostensive contexts
Two studies of verb learning are reported. The focus of both studies was on children in their second year of life learning verbs in various pragmatic contexts. Of particular interest was the comparison of ostensive contexts – in which word and referent were simultaneously present in the child's perceptual field – to non-ostensive contexts. In a naturalistic study of 24 children at 1;3 and 1;9, it was found that mothers modelled verbs for their ch…
Two-year-olds' conversations with their mothers and preschool-aged siblings
The pragmatics of sibling-infant and mother-infant conversations were compared. Sixteen children, 22 to 26 months of age, were videotaped for 15 minutes in dyadic interaction with their mothers and for 15 minutes in dyadic interaction with their preschool-aged siblings. Sibling-infant and mother-infant conversations were compared on three dimensions: quantitative characteristics, conversational style and conversational repair of potential breakdo…
Author's response: On defining language: Replies to Shatz and Ninio
The social bases of language acquisition
A language is composed of conventional symbols shaped by their social‐communicative functions. Children acquire these symbols, both lexical and syntactic, in the context of culturally constituted event structures that make salient these functions. In the acquisition process children rely on cultural learning skills (i.e., imitative learning). These skills emanate from their ability to participate intersubjectively with adults in cultural activiti…
Cultural learning
This target article presents a theory of human cultural learning. Cultural learning is identified with those instances of social learning in which intersubjectivity or perspective-taking plays a vital role, both in the original learning process and in the resulting cognitive product. Cultural learning manifests itself in three forms during human ontogeny: imitative learning, instructed learning, and collaborative learning – in that order. Evidenc…
The learning and use of gestural signals by young chimpanzees: A trans-generational study
Variability in Early Communicative Development
Can an ape understand a sentence? A review of language comprehension in ape and child by E.S. Savage-Rumbaugh et al
The social learning of tool use by orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus)
Psychology (215 works) · Child and Animal Learning Development (142 works) · Developmental psychology (110 works) · Linguistics (106 works) · Cognitive psychology (99 works) · Social Psychology (89 works) · Language Development and Disorders (77 works) · Computer Science (66 works) · Cognition (50 works) · Philosophy (50 works)