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Tomasello’s great innovation was to create a set of simple tasks that could be given to chimps and to human toddlers in nearly identical form.53 Solving the task earned the chimp or child a treat (usually a piece of food for the chimp, a small toy for the child). Some of the tasks required thinking only about physical objects in physical space—for

Jonathan Haidt • The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

Michael Tomasello's book "The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition" argues that humans' unique cognitive abilities stem from our capacity for shared intentionality - the ability to participate in collaborative activities with shared goals and intentions. This enables cultural learning and the creation of artifacts, practices, and institutions that a... See more

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Tomasello believes that human ultrasociality arose in two steps. The first was the ability to share intentions in groups of two or three people who were actively hunting or foraging together. (That was the Rubicon.) Then, after several hundred thousand years of evolution for better sharing and collaboration as nomadic hunter-gatherers, more collabo

Jonathan Haidt • The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

Chapter 1

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Much of our seeming intelligence actually comes not from raw brainpower or a plethora of instincts, but rather from the accumulated repertoire of mental tools (e.g., integers), skills (differentiating right from left), concepts (fly wheels), and categories (basic color terms) that we inherit culturally from earlier generations.

Joseph Henrich • The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter

And that value kicks in early. Toddlers whose dads encouraged exploring (while setting limits) had better social and emotional skills twelve to eighteen months later.17

John Gray PhD • The Boy Crisis

My anecdotal evidence generally seems to support the idea that group sizes will usually plateau at a number lower than 150 participants. This comes from 20 years of doing facilitation both on and offline, running several software companies, and running various forums at America Online. In particular, many online communities provide good evidence fo... See more

Christopher Allen • The Dunbar Number as a Limit to Group Sizes

Origins of Human Communication (Jean Nicod Lectures)

Michael Tomasello

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Cover of Origins of Human Communication (Jean Nicod Lectures)

According to Tomasello, human cognition veered away from that of other primates when our ancestors developed shared intentionality.54 At some point in the last million years, a small group of our ancestors developed the ability to share mental representations of tasks that two or more of them were pursuing together. For example, while foraging, one