Winner of the William James Book AwardWinner of the Eleanor Maccoby Book Award“A landmark in our understanding of human development.”—Paul Harris, author of Trusting What You’re Told“Magisterial…Makes an impressive argument that most distinctly human traits are established early in childhood and that the general chronology in which these traits appear can…be identified.”—Wall Street Journal

A NEW APPROACH TO EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY: A leading developmental psychologist proposes an evolutionary pathway to understanding human psychological agency.Nature cannot build organisms biologically prepared for every contingency they might possibly encounter. Instead, Nature builds some organisms to function as feedback control systems that pursue goals, make informed behavioral decisions about how best to pursue those goals in the current situation, and then mon...

Through experiments with kids and chimpanzees, this cutting-edge theory in developmental psychology reveals how cooperation is a distinctly human combination of innate and learned behavior.“[A] fascinating approach to the question of what makes us human.” —Publishers WeeklyDrop something in front of a 2-year-old, and she’s likely to pick it up for you. This is not a learned behavior, psychologist Michael Tomasello argues. Through o...

Ambitious and elegant, this book builds a bridge between evolutionary theory and cultural psychology. Michael Tomasello is one of the very few people to have done systematic research on the cognitive capacities of both nonhuman primates and human children. The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition identifies what the differences are, and suggests where they might have come from.Tomasello argues that the roots of the human capacity for symbol-based culture, and the kind of ps...

Winner of the Eleanor Maccoby Book Award in Developmental Psychology, American Psychological AssociationWinner of a PROSE Award, Association of American PublishersShortlist, Cognitive Development Society Book AwardA Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the YearA Natural History of Human Morality offers the most detailed account to date of the evolution of human moral psychology. Based on extensive experimental data comparing great apes and hum...

A Wall Street Journal Favorite Read of the YearA Guardian Top Science Book of the YearTool-making or culture, language or religious belief: ever since Darwin, thinkers have struggled to identify what fundamentally differentiates human beings from other animals. In this much-anticipated book, Michael Tomasello weaves his twenty years of comparative studies of humans and great apes into a compelling argument that cooperative social interaction is the key to o...

First published in 1997, Primate Cognition was a groundbreaking and highly successful book that set the agenda for a new field of study. Borrowing theoretical constructs and paradigms from human cognitive science and developmental psychology, the book reviewed all of the empirical research existing at that time concerning both physical cognition (space and objects, tools and causality, features and categories, and quantities) as well as social cognition (social knowledge and inter...

Children of different ages live in different worlds. This is partly due to learning: as children learn more and more about the world they experience it in different ways. But learning cannot be the whole story or else children could learn anything at any age - which they cannot. In a startlingly original proposal, Michael Tomasello argues that children of different ages live and learn in different worlds because their capacities to cognitively represent and operate on their experience chan...

Soon after Charles Darwin formulated his theory of evolution, primate cognition became a major area of research. In this book, Michael Tomasello and Josep Call assess the current state of our knowledge about the cognitive skills of non-human primates. They integrate empirical findings on the topic from the beginning of the century to the present, placing this research in theoretical perspective. They begin with an examination of the way primates adapt to their physical world, mostly for th...

In this groundbreaking book, Michael Tomasello presents a comprehensive usage-based theory of language acquisition. Drawing together a vast body of empirical research in cognitive science, linguistics, and developmental psychology, Tomasello demonstrates that we don’t need a self-contained “language instinct” to explain how children learn language. Their linguistic ability is interwoven with other cognitive abilities.Tomasello argues that the essence of language is its symbolic dim...

Tool-making or culture, language or religious belief: ever since Darwin, thinkers have struggled to identify what fundamentally differentiates human beings from other animals. Michael Tomasello weaves his twenty years of comparative studies of humans and great apes into a compelling argument that cooperative social interaction is the key to our cognitive uniqueness. Tomasello maintains that our prehuman ancestors, like today's great apes, were social beings who could solve problems by thin...