Michael Tomasello

Michael Tomasello (born January 18, 1950) is an American developmental and comparative psychologist, as well as a linguist. He is professor of psychology at Duke University.

Earning many prizes and awards from the end of the 1990s onward, he is considered one of today's most authoritative developmental and comparative psychologists. He is "one of the few scientists worldwide who is acknowledged as an expert in multiple disciplines". His "pioneering research on the origins of social cognition has led to revolutionary insights in both developmental psychology and primate cognition."

Tomasello was born in Bartow, Florida and attended high school at the Taft School in Watertown, Connecticut. He received his bachelor's degree 1972 from Duke University and his doctorate in Experimental Psychology 1980 from University of Georgia.

Tomasello was a professor of psychology and anthropology at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, US, during the 1980s and 1990s. Subsequently, he moved to Germany to become co-director of Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, and later also honorary professor at University of Leipzig and co-director of the Wolfgang Kohler Primate Research Center. In 2016, he became professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University, where he now is James F. Bonk Distinguished Professor.

He works on child language acquisition as a crucially important aspect of the enculturation process. He is a critic of Noam Chomsky's universal grammar, rejecting the idea of an innate universal grammar and instead proposing a functional theory of language development (sometimes called the social-pragmatic theory of language acquisition or usage-based approach to language acquisition) in which children learn linguistic structures through intention-reading and pattern-finding in their discourse interactions with others.

Tomasello also studied broader cognitive skills in a comparative light at the Wolfgang Köhler Primate Research Center in Leipzig. With his research team, he created a set of experimental devices to test toddlers' and apes' spatial, instrumental, and social cognition; he argued that social (even ultrasocial) cognition is what truly sets human apart.

Tomasello conducted experimental lab work with nonhuman apes to test his ideas around what makes humans unique. Based largely on lab tests, he argued that apes lack a series of skills:

Critics of Tomasello — including Frans de Waal, Christoph Boesch, Andrew Whiten, and Volker Sommer — argued that he exaggerated human-animal differences and discounted key social abilities in nonhuman primates. Boesch, a fellow Max Planck anthropologist who studied chimpanzees in the field, argued that the severe psychological traumas experienced by Tomasello's lab subjects rendered his conclusions moot. Other critics joined Boesch in highlighting incongruities between Tomasello's experients on human children and apes, differences that these critics claimed made for apples and oranges comparisons.