Why we cooperate tomasello summary

Deutlich wird dies an den vier direkt folgenden knappen Stellungnahmen der vier oben genannten Forscher, auf die sich Tomasello in seinem Abschnitt auch teilweise bezieht.

Carol S. Deutlich wird hier, dass Tomsello sich auf herausforderndes Gebiet begibt. Das Buch macht dies sehr gut deutlich und betont damit die Wichtigkeit von selbstreflexivem Denken, dem Tomasello durch das Forum im zweiten Teil seines Buches Raum gibt. Elizabeth S. Aykut Karabay. Vedat Hayri Adivar. The book summarizes theories about human cooperation, from a comparative and develpomental psychology perspective. It focuses on work done mainly from the author's laboratory.

While this might not be a bad thing sometimes when a theory is presented, some parts of it are poorly explained in comparison to others, going from a lot of research presented, with detailed examples, to just one line. It's easy to read and understand, but I felt it was rushed. Quick read but will make you realize how much of human nature we think we know and take for granted when we are much stranger creatures than we ever consider.

Especially pushes back on jaded and cynical views of human nature when one considers we are by far the most cooperative animal we know of so far. Ann Douglas. Find out more Tomasello, Michael. Why we cooperate. Request this item to view in the Library's reading rooms using your library card.

To learn more about how to request items watch this short online video. You can view this on the NLA website. Login Register. Current search limits: Clear format limits. Advanced search Search history. Herein lie the greatest strengths of Tomasello's book: he is not afraid to be wrong and he gets us thinking. Despite its title, Tomasello's book does not address the question of the evolutionary forces underlying the origins of cooperation.

In the end, this is one of the strengths of the book; by sidestepping these murky waters, he bypasses an obstacle that often prevents discourse among cooperation theorists who get mired in disagreements about levels of selection and semantics. Instead, Tomasello focuses his book on the mechanisms underlying human social abilities and behaviour, resisting the urge to weigh in on the debate about roles of kin selection, group selection and reciprocity in the evolution of cooperation.

Tomasello's book focuses on four fundamental questions that have guided his research program for nearly 30 years. First, is altruism 'natural' in human children, or is it imparted by culture?

He reviews his research demonstrating that young children exhibit spontaneous altruistic behaviour. However, he argues that as children grow they begin to cooperate conditionally rather than naively, attending to social norms and the behaviour of others.

Second, he asks how humans and chimps differ with regard to their propensities for conspecific collaborative interaction. Tomasello argues that humans are unique in our capacity to establish a collective sense of intention, a "we", that generates mutual expectations, rights and obligations.

In this case, perhaps surprisingly, children and chimpanzees are more different. Thus, at two years of age, when their cognitive abilities for understanding the physical world of space, objects, and causality are still identical with those of chimpanzees and other apes, young children already are able to collaborate by forming shared goals and dividing the labor among participants in species-unique ways.

For instance, when two chimpanzees pull in a long board with food on each end, they work together well and each takes the food on their end. But when the food is clumped in the middle of the board, they have difficulty cooperating, presumably because they are anticipating the competition, if not the fight, over the food at the end. In contrast, young children are not affected by whether the food is distributed on the ends of the board or clumped the middle.

They almost always take equal shares in either case, and cooperation continues because they both trust that they will be able to work out a fair division of spoils at the end. We have even found that in a cooperative task if one child's reward suddenly appears first, she nevertheless feels a commitment to finish the collaboration so that the other gets his reward as well - whereas chimpanzees do not seem to feel this same commitment. Human children are uniquely equipped to engage with others in many different kinds of "shared intentionality".

So what happens to these angelic little toddlers? How do they turn into the adults who do all of the not-so-nice things that we do to one another?