A Review of “Becoming Human”

Abstract

Inquisitive observers of human culture encounter a paradox: We treat the belief-systems, norms, and practices of our own communities as if they are a fixed part of our nature, yet across groups of people, the diversity of ways of being – and corresponding diversity of psychologies – suggests the opposite. This observation has motivated a sea-change in the social and cognitive sciences away from claiming human universals (especially universals based solely on the study of “WEIRD” populations, Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010) and toward highlighting human diversity. This is an exciting and important change, but the explosion of new theories, new research paradigms, and new data can at times feel dizzying and chaotic for those of us who seek a principled way to understand what it means to be human. In his book Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny, Michael Tomasello provides an elegant, culturally aware, and evolutionarily informed account of what we share despite our differences: our uniquely human ontogenies. This book is centrally about human development, specifically the unique cognitive and behavioral capacities arising in the first five years that enable us to participate in human social life and culture. Readers familiar with Tomasello’s extensive body of work will recognize the foundations of the evolutionary argument: Adaptations for social coordination and social transmission explain how humans diverged psychologically from our nearest primate relatives. Our capacity for Shared Intentionality – for acting collaboratively with others toward shared goals – is the key to human cognitive uniqueness and also to our success. But in Becoming Human, more than in any of his prior work, Tomasello elucidates every aspect of the development of the cognitive capacities necessary for shared intentionality in detail. In so doing, he elevates development as the primary, principled explanation for human cultural and psychological diversity. The argument can be summarized by reference to the title: To understand being, we have to understand becoming. Tomasello’s developmental theory is a classic nature-nurture interaction with twist: he argues for precisely timed maturational changes that emerge as a result of transactions between child and environment. The transactions are organized into four categories of learning experiences – individual, observational, pedagogical (instruction from adults), and collaborative (coordination with peers). As Tomasello states, “It is what children experience and learn during these maturationally structured transactions – and in many cases how they learn and who they learn from – that actually propels human ontogeny forward” (p. 35). An important part of the story is the capacity for self-regulation and adaptive action. Each social learning experience taxes the developing child’s executive self-regulation skills in unique ways. Self-regulating in various social contexts contributes to growth in cognitive capacities necessary for perspective-taking, problem solving, communication, and morality. This developmental account also neatly provides Tomasello and his collaborators a method for putting the