Michael Tomasello’s theory: what makes us human?

The social intelligence of humans is a consequence of the development of culture and language.

Compared to other animals, humans have built highly developed societies in terms of culture and technology. Historically, this has been attributed to a hierarchical superiority of humans on a supposed evolutionary scale. For example, theories that the human brain is larger or simply superior are still in vogue today.

The research and theory of Michael Tomasello have been the most relevant recent contributions in comparative psychology to a classic question: what makes us human? That is, what makes us different from other animals?

Michael Tomasello's theory

Michael Tomasello, co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, is a psychologist who researches social cognition, i.e., how people process social information, social learning and communication.

In recent years Tomasello has mainly studied communication and shared intentionality. To this end, he has compared the cognitive processes of children and chimpanzees. he has compared the cognitive processes of children and chimpanzees. chimpanzeeschimpanzees, since they are the closest animal to humans.

In his experiments, Tomasello analyzed, among other aspects, the way in which children and chimpanzees share rewards after carrying out a collaborative effort. To do so, he compared the results obtained in collaborative tasks performed by pairs of children or chimpanzees.

Although the chimpanzees studied were able to work as a team, after achieving the reward, food in this case, the more dominant of the two kept the entire prize. This tendency towards individualism makes it difficult for non-human primates to maintain cooperative relationships in a sustained manner over time.

On the other hand children shared the reward more or less fairly after collaborating to obtain it. after collaborating to obtain it. Even if they argued or tried to keep all the food, there was a kind of negotiation that usually ended with each of the children keeping half of the prize.

Tomasello affirms from his experiments and observations that the societies formed by the great apes are much more individual. great apes are much more individualistic than those of humans. individualistic than those of humans. He attributes this to the greater capacity of individuals, even when they are very young, for collaboration and for attributing intentions to others.

This ability to "mind-reading," or imagining the emotions and thoughts of others and understand that they may be different from their own, is known as "theory of mind". Great apes and other animals, such as crows or parrots, are also thought to possess this ability, but it is much less developed than in humans.

Tomasello says that great apes often use theory of mind to compete, for example to obtain sexual partners. They may also engage in altruistic or prosocial behaviors to help other individuals, but they only tend to do so if there is no competition for resources and the effort involved is minimal.

According to Tomasello, chimpanzee groups chimpanzee groups rely heavily on dominance and individual activity, e.g., foraging for food.For example, food gathering or care of the young is carried out by a single individual.

In contrast, among humans, social relationships and hierarchies are not determined only by selfishness and domination, but collaboration is more important. Tomasello argues that non-cooperative people (free riders) tend to be left out of cooperative activities.

The development of culture and morality

Another fundamental difference between us and other primates is that we humans create social norms and institutions. humans create social norms and institutions. According to Tomasello, these are a consequence of our ability to exchange information with other members of our group and to transmit culture from generation to generation, which allows us to progressively complexify our societies.

The degree of collaboration and interdependence also increases as societies develop. Human groups tend to grow larger and larger: in a few thousand years, a tiny period of time in the context of evolution, we have gone from small hunter-gatherer tribes to today's globalized world. This progress would have been unthinkable without the development of language and the cumulative progress of culture and technology.

According to Tomasello children are instinctively cooperative but as they grow up and are influenced by the culture around them they learn to discriminate with whom they collaborate, mainly so as not to be exploited by free riders.

Historically, human intelligence has been considered quantitatively superior to animal intelligence because our brains are more developed. However, according to Tomasello's studies, children outperform chimpanzees. children are superior to chimpanzees in social intelligence but have a level of physical intelligence, for example spatial or bodily, equivalent to that of chimpanzees.

Tomasello and other authors have proven that great apes have cognitive abilities that until recently we would have attributed exclusively to humans. Among other things, they know that objects continue to exist even if they disappear from sight (Piagetian object permanence) and can mentally differentiate quantities.

Chimpanzee offspring are also adept at making communicative gestures, but their variety and complexity are few. Another ape, gorilla Koko has been trained in sign language by Francine Patterson. by Francine Patterson. Koko has even been able to create complex concepts by combining several words. There are also examples of how non-human animals can pass on culture from generation to generation: for example, in a group of chimpanzees in the Ivory Coast, youngsters are taught to use stones as hammers to crack open nuts.

Cooperation makes us human

According to the constructivist Tomasello, people learn language by cumulative cultural transmission, which has allowed our verbal communication to be very complex. In addition our body is perfectly adapted to languagefrom the speech organs to specific areas of the brain. Just as marine animals have adapted to an aquatic context, we have adapted to a social context.