A Natural History of Human Thinking Hardcover – February 17, 2014

This book presents an overall convincing theory of the evolution of human thinking through joint to collective intentionality, together with increasing sociability, multi-level disoursive thinking, self-monitoring and modern language. The emphasis is on increasing cooperative ways of life meeting changing evolutionary challenges. As put by the author ‘in the current view, the most plausible evolutionary scenario is that new ecological pressures (e.g., the disappearance of individually obtainable foods and then increased population sizes and competition from other groups) acted directly on human social interaction and organization, leading to the evolution of more cooperative human lifeways’ (p 124).But the author goes further, putting a heavy load on agreement based on reason and rationality: ‘in their collaborative interactions modern humans conform to the collectively accepted ways of doing things, based on norms of cooperation, and […] linguistically formulated arguments, based on the group’s norms of reason’ (p.120). And ‘cooperative argumentation for making joint decisions required that individuals make explicit their reasons and justifications to others in order to convince them of their truth; therefore, to be effective, they had to meet the group’s normative expectations for rational discourse‘ (p. 139).What about passions, charisma and religions? The claim that human collective action is based on ‘rational discourse’ assumes that values and beliefs are a subject for ‘rationality’, which is very doubtful to put it mildly; and that agreement is mainly reached by shared reasoning, which is also very doubtful. At the very least the book should have considered emotions as an alternaive basis for collective life and choice and tried to argue that they too are ‘rational’, instead of ignoring the possibility that passions make the world go around and reason is serving them.Related to overtrust in ‘reason’ is the ignorance of warfare and also mass killings of ‘others’ as a driver of in-group sociability and collective choice. True, the author mentions ‘competition’ 48 times, but without explicating its more bloody forms. However, ‘war’ is mentioned only once, towards the end, by the way and in a modern context: ‘contemporary human societies are also full of selfishness and noncooperation, not to mention cruelty and war’ (p. 158). This may fit the exaggerated trust in reason and rationality, but misses an important factor in the history of human thinking.Professor Yehezkel DrorThe Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Michael Tomasello is a behavioral and evolutionary anthropologist who heads the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. His major contributions deals with the ways in which human thinking goes beyond that of other primates not simply quantitatively (we have bigger brains that can do more computations faster) but especially qualitatively (we can think in ways that are not available at all even to the great apes).Tomasello derives his conclusions from careful and close study in the laboratory of differences in behavior of adult and child humans on the one hand, and non-human primates, especially the great apes, on the other. He shows that there are three types of human cognition, only one of which, individual rationality (“me-thinking”) is shared with the great apes (and a fortiori with other animal species).Individual rationality is exemplified by the economist’s utility maximizer. Individual rationality can be purely selfish, in which individuals are sociopaths who care about others only as objects that may help satisfy their personal needs, but can also include elements of empathy in which individuals care about the suffering of others, and also elements of negative hostility in which individuals gain pleasure from hurting and punishing others who have displeased them..A second kind of human cognition is what Tomasello calls “collective intentionality,” Tomasello writes: “Modern humans became cultural beings…by creating…cultural conventions, norms, and institutions built not on personal but on cultural common ground. They thus became thoroughly group-minded individuals.” (p. 80) This sort of human cognition is extremely well-known, as developed in sociology by Emile Durkheim, George Herbert Mead, Talcott Parsons and many others. Tomasello offers the reader an informative overview of this aspect of human cognition. He stresses that humans obey social norms altruistically when they are considered legitimate, even at personal cost, and humans spontaneously punish others who are observed violating social norms for selfish gain (for a more expansive treatment, see my paper with sociologist Dirk Helbing, “Homo Socialis” available from my web site). He adds to the standard repertoire of arguments the contention that this sort of cognition is absent even in the great apes. He writes: “Although great apes retaliate for harm done to them, they do not punish other individual for acts toward third parties. In contrast, three-year-old children enforce social norms on others even when they are not personally involved…” (p. 87)Tomasello’s unique and quite stunning contribution is his analysis of what he calls “joint intentionality.” The idea here is that two or more humans can “collaborate” in accomplishing a goal. Collaboration is more complex than cooperation, which merely involves all participants in a task carrying out their part the process of achieving some end. For instance, chimpanzees cooperate in catching monkeys, but they do not collaborate. Each chimpanzee wants to catch the monkey and eat as much as he can before the other swarm him demanding a share. Each chimpanzee does better in catching monkeys when surrounded by other chimpanzees equally intent on catching the monkey because when a number of hunters chase their prey at the same time, there are fewer avenues of escape for the monkey. But this form of cooperative hunting is pure “mutualism:” the chimps are each out form himself, and each chimp is oblivious to what is going on in other chimps’ minds and does not modulate his activity strategically by anticipating what the other chimps are about to do. Such cooperative hunting is pure individual rationality me-thinking “parallel play,” as is observed in very young children in a sandbox.Collaboration goes way beyond cooperation by linking the minds of the collaborators together in a form of networked minds with consciousness and intentionality distributed across the minds of the participants. Joint intentionality is “we-thinking,” a form of cognition that even children understand, and is quite unavailable to other animals. Tomasello’s analysis of we-thinking is, to my mind, completely convincing, and quite new in the literature on human cooperation.The notion of joint intentionality can be dramatically illustrated by reference to a very simple example from game theory (Tomasello does not use this example). Consider a game in which Bob and Alice each receive 100 when both say “Up,” and 1 when they both say “Down.” If they say different things, they both get 0. The joint intentionality solution is that both say “Up.” However, pure individual rationality cannot predict what Bob and Alice will do. The game has two Nash equilibria in pure strategies, and either player will choose “Down” if he or she believes that is what the other will do. It take social rationality for Bob to reason as follows: “Alice is socially rational and therefore she understands what a collaborative effort is. Alice will see that we are involved in a collaborative effort in which we have a common payoff and by considering the rationality involved in joint intentionality, Alice will know that I expect her to choose Up, and therefore she will choose Up. Therefore my best play is Up.” Alice will analyze the situation in the same way, and both will choose the high-payoff strategy Up.Note that in this example, both Bob and Alice have perfectly selfish preferences and their behavior is completely amoral. All they share is a common social rationality that allows them to predict what each other is thinking, and therefore what each other will do.I first came across the notion of collective intentionality in the works of such philosophers as John Searle, Michael Bacharach, Margaret Gilbert, Raimo Tuomela and Nathalie Gold, and the economist Robert Sugden. However, I was quite unpersuaded by their arguments.Consider John Searle’s contribution “Collective Intentions and Actions,” in a volume entitled Intentions in Communication. Searle argues (a) collective intentionality obviously exists, and (b) it cannot be explained as an aggregation of individual intentionalities, but rather "is a primitive phenomenon." His argument for (a) is that "It seems obvious that there really is a collective intentional behavior as distinct from individual intentional behavior. You can see this by watching a football team execute a pass play or hear it by listening to an orchestra." (p. 401) However, this is not only not obvious, it is plainly wrong. What is experienced in this and similar cases is highly coordinated cooperative behavior. In both cases, the role of each participant has been carefully marked out by a single agent, whom I will call the "choreographer," or perhaps a few interacting agents using a collective decision process to adjudicate differences among them in the content of the choreography, and conveyed to the members of the "team." A "pass play" in football is diagrammed, memorized by the players, and carried out on precise cue under objectively given conditions. A similar analysis holds for the interpretation of a musical score and its execution by the musicians.Searle argues that we can see the collective intentionality in the idea that there is a collective goal to the group---winning the football match, and producing beautiful music. However, individual group members may place some value on this "goal," but are unlikely to be motivated thereby unless they are properly rewarded in other, usually more material, ways. Moreover, some group members may actually have the intention of out-performing other members, thereby gaining personally at the expense of the "collective intention" of the group. Similarly, group members may be performing solely for the pay, or for the chance to get a better job, or even to get a date with another group member. Perhaps Searle can introspect and discover that he has performed in a group with "collective intentional" behavior, but I have not. I am certain that I am not alone. Therefore, even should some people like Searle exist, it would be a miracle if they more than rarely constituted any real collectively interacting cooperative group.Tomasello’s contribution is the reposition the concept of joint intentionality from the realm of collective behavior to that of social epistemology. Although Tomasello calls this form of cognition “joint intentionality,” it is really a high level cognitive representation in each participant of the mind of the other participants that can be used to predict their behavior in the face of the various contingencies involved in carrying out their collaboration. This way of thinking about the cognitive basis of collaboration might better be called “joint representation” of a task, which is an aspect of a larger capacity of social cognition in humans, who have evolved in groups as networked minds with cognition distributed over this network. It is this aspect of the human mind that permits the forms of collaboration that has rendered our species so successful.I have only one quibble with Tomasello’s analysis: his attempt at a game-theoretic formulation of joint intentionality. A game has payoffs, strategies and information structure (see my book Game Theory Evolving, Princeton University Press, 2009). Game theory is based on pure individual rationality, although it can be extended to collective rationality by drawing upon other-regarding preferences and treating social norms as correlated equilibria (see my book, The Bounds of Reason, Princeton University Press, 2009, and with Samuel Bowles, A Cooperative Species, Princeton University Press 2011). Collaboration, by contrast, is a non-strategic coordination process closer to engineering that to strategic interaction. Tomasello tries to conceptualize joint intentionality in terms of the famous Stag Hunt game, in which hunters can gain a small reward by hunting hares individuals, but a large reward by hunting stag collectively. But this is a poor formulation. Collaboration is an instance of returns to scale through a complex division of labor, as first outlines by Adam Smith in his famous book The Wealth of Nations. It has little to do with the Stag Hunt Game.Indeed, the most serious task facing collaborating individuals is that of dealing with “free riders” who shirk in cooperating, but still demand a share of the product of collaboration. There is a huge literature on how this problem is handled, and it is quite unpersuasive to argue that the Stag Hunt scenario is an alternative, to this analysis, which is traditionally, and correctly, I believe, rooted in the analysis of social dilemmas, of which the Public Goods Game is the most well known example.

Bought as a gift

I will thoroughly enjoy reading this book, thank you Amazon.

Well written speculations. Brings advances in interdisciplinary research together to explain how human thinking emerged from prior forms. Page turner.

Tomasello's "Cultural Origins of Human Cognition" benefits from clear prose and clear organization. This book continues the clear organization, but not the prose--which can get obscure and technical in ways the earlier book avoided. This difficulty aside, Tomasello makes his complex argument about the differences between non-human primate "thinking" and human cognition effectively and comprehensively. Of course, many people are straightforwardly skeptical about the field of evolutionary psychology, but Tomasello makes the best possible case.

This engaging, robustly grounded book summarizes Michael Tomasello's team experimental works at Max Planck Institute, comparing apes and preschool child in both practical and ethical-moral reasoning tasks.Objectivity, normativity, and self-reflection : following Tomasello's main hypothesis, these major features of human thinking are species-typical, tied to, and flowing from, cooperative engagement, in a two-step developmental sequence (face-to-face interactions in Joint intentionality, then global, group-minded convention-building and -enforcing or Collective intentionality). Both steps emerge around a common conceptual ground, acting as meaning-endowing.Detailed experiments show subject's ability, or lack of, to individualize roles and perspectives under a common intent, to catch up with the relevance of signs and signals, to read the intention of others, to re-engage a departing collaborative partner, to work until other participant gets his reward too, etc. Skills of this sort arise in human only, and at a fairly low age, allowing no prior internalization of parental-cultural enticement to account satisfactorily for them.The work done is far-ranging. I have read comments from practitioners of different fields, rejoicing Tomasello's contributions to psychotherapy, economics, management, social sciences' philosophy and the like. The taking down of the Language Idol (which dates at least from the Old Testament) is one way in which Tomasello can shed new and powerful lights on our common sense, and on the handling of collective concepts, among other things.Common interpersonal and cultural basis mediates our way to relate to ourself, to other and to the world : this count among anthropologists' and sociologists' basic, and dearest, claims, and yet, claims for which supports could have been lacking (if no longer today, then at least back in Durkheim' or even Franz Boas' time).Together with a overall clear writing, sense of modesty, and openness, a dense and rich empirical set of evidences help make Tomasello's book great and admirable. Not many scientist can rival him on this ground.I have kept track of Tomasello from The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition up to now, only to see my conviction growing stronger : he should be set next to Rousseau, Adam Smith and René Descartes among the most significant Western intellectual achievements.

Really thought-provoking and backed up with good evidence.

Une approche scientifique, très bien documentée et construite. A lire absolument pour prendre du recul sur quelques contre vérités modernes...

Tomasello betrachtet nur das, was er sehen möchte.Und kommt dadurch zu falschen Schlussfolgerungen.Die Idee einer "shared intentionality" blendet einfach sowohl den unbewußten Teil der Kommunikation und des menschlichen Verhaltens aus (siehe J.A. Bargh - Social Psychology and the Unconscious: The Automaticity of Higher Mental Processes)als auch die vielen negativen Seiten von Gruppenverhalten.Der "Wandel des Wandels" ist für Tomasello nicht zugängig. Aber der Erfolg der technischen Entwicklung (fälschlicher Weise von Tomasello als "Kultur" definiert) ist für den heutigen Menschen das größte Problem.

Lured by the title and well-written book description, I bought it. What a waste. It’s unreadable. I waded through what Tomasello conceives to be English as far as page 15 before deciding that I had more urgent calls on my time. Here are some examples:[Beginning on page 5, paragraph 3, line 10; other references below are abbreviated in the form of 5.3.10]. “In the context of cooperative argumentation in group decision-making, linguistic conventions could be used to justify and make explicit one’s reasons for an assertion within the framework of the group’s norms of rationality.” [33 words, 63 syllables]. Is Tomasello trying to say, “When discussing what to do, using familiar words and ideas helps listeners to understand.” [14 words, 34 syllables]? I wish he had learned this lesson.[6.2.6]: “But it is only in actually exercising these skills in social interactions with others during ontogeny that children create new representational formats and new inferential reasoning possibilities as they internalize, in Vygotskian fashion, their coordinative interactions with others into thinking for the self.” [43 words, 92 syllables]. I think he wants readers to know that, “As they grow up, children invent new words and connections through playing together, and this helps them think for themselves.” [20 words, 28 syllables]. But I may have missed something.One more horror, then I’ll stop [15.2.1]: “Our characterization of the cognitive skills of this last common ancestor will derive from empirical research with great apes, cast in the theoretical framework of individual intentionality just elaborated: behavioral self-regulation involving cognitive models and instrumental inferences, along with some form of behavioral monitoring.” [44 words, you count the syllables.] What does it mean? Search me.Then there is the matter of accuracy [11.4.7]: “Thus, for a leopard, the situation of bananas in a tree would not represent an opportunity to eat,”. How does Tomasello know this? That leopards will lie in wait in the tree Kigelia africana for impala to come to feed on the fallen fruit is well documented. In the same paragraph, asserting that leopards cannot climb trees without low-hanging branches is wrong. What else is?Back to page 15, [line 2] “… focus on the last common ancestor [LCA] of humans and other extant primates.” Does Tomasello really mean to include bush babies and lemurs? If he does, he is going back 65 million years [my]. If he means our LCA with great apes, then it is about 18 my; with bonobos it is, as he says, about 6 my. I would like to know which he means. This may be a slip but fear that it is simply confusion induced by his impenetrably pretentious prose.I wonder whether this book has anything interesting to say on the vitally important subject of human thinking but I’m not prepared to put in the effort needed to find out.

An excellent book on every level. It creates a new perspective on human thinking. Nobody who study social cognition and evolution of human thinking can't bypass this book.

Sadly this book is written by and for members of the walled city of academia.Moreover it seems to have been constructed in the blind alley of philosophy and laboratory science, hence the opaque language.If his theories are of value, I hope someone better than me can translate it into English.Note: I read widely in all aspects of science, psychology and the natural world, but I rarely come across such unreadable works in the public domain. I was hoping this book could add to the research for my own book, but alas, I have wasted my money.I never hurl books, but I hurled this one.