Shared intentionality (Tomasello)

According to Michael Tomasello, shared intentionality is the ability to share common goals and intentions with others. Two people carry a table together and both know that they are carrying it together – out of this “we”, according to Tomasello, arise cooperation, language, norms and culture.

This entry deals with Tomasello’s idea of shared intentionality and what it means for altruism, not with his work as a whole.

About the person. Michael Tomasello (born 1950), American developmental psychologist and primatologist, for many years a director at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. His Tanner Lectures at Stanford were published in 2009 as Why We Cooperate.

What is shared intentionality?

Great apes pursue goals, also understand what others see and want, and occasionally work together. What they lack, according to Tomasello, is the common goal: a plan that both know and in which each has their role. Children can do this from about eighteen months. They point at things in order to communicate something, swap roles in games and expect the other to contribute their part.

Tomasello calls this ability shared intentionality or we-intentionality. It is to be distinguished from what he calls mindreading – understanding what another person knows and wants. That is not the same as compassion: apes master it too, and in competition for food they are even good at it.

Do children help of their own accord?

Yes – and this is one of the best-known findings from Tomasello’s research group. From around their first birthday, children help adults spontaneously: they pick up things that have fallen down, open a door for someone with their hands full, point to something that is being looked for (Warneken & Tomasello 2006). Encouragement from parents changes little about this – and rewarding them even weakens helping afterwards (Warneken & Tomasello 2008).

Only later do children learn whom to help: someone who helps in turn rather than someone who takes advantage of them. This is where socialisation comes in, and Tomasello gave it more weight in his later books. More recent research stresses this as well: parents and surroundings shape early on how children help (Dahl & Brownell 2019), and as they grow older, children align their sharing ever more closely with the norms of their society (House et al. 2013).

Our reading: the willingness to help is innate, its direction is socialised. Upbringing does not have to create helping in the first place – but it can bury it. This is the prosocial nature of human beings in a form that stands up to research.

How does cooperation become altruism?

Tomasello says explicitly that he does not consider altruism to be the foundation of human social life. For him, the starting point is working together for mutual benefit – hunting as a team, searching for food together. Whoever depends on others in this has reason to care for them and to be a good partner themselves, otherwise nobody will choose them. Out of this way of life, Tomasello said in an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), a German daily newspaper, „genuiner Altruismus“ (“genuine altruism”; our translation) emerged.

This fits our view of reciprocity: help on an equal footing begins where both contribute something. And it explains a fine observation of Tomasello’s: lies work at all only because people fundamentally assume that others will help them. Trust is the ground on which its abuse first becomes possible.

How do children learn norms?

Through imitation, participation and explanation. Children adopt not only what others do but also how it is done “properly” – and even three-year-olds correct others who break a rule of a game (Schmidt & Tomasello 2012). Shame and guilt keep these norms alive from within.

As for upbringing, Tomasello draws on the psychologist Martin Hoffman: children whose parents explain the consequences of their behaviour for others internalise norms better than children who are mainly reprimanded and punished (Hoffman 1975). Our reading: understanding carries further than prescribing. What has been understood holds; what has merely been ordered remains brittle. Harald Alke describes the opposite as “educational commands”, from which one has to free oneself consciously as an adult.

Do animals take revenge too?

Yes. Chimpanzees retaliate when food is taken from them (Jensen, Call & Tomasello 2007), and they avoid partners who have proved to be poor collaborators (Melis, Hare & Tomasello 2006). What they do not do: punish, as uninvolved bystanders, a breach of the rules that does not affect them.

This enforcement of norms by third parties is, according to Tomasello, typically human, and where it imposes costs on the one who punishes, he calls it – in the German edition of his book – „(altruistisch)“ (“(altruistic)”; our translation). For him, punishment stabilises cooperation but does not explain its origin.

How much punishment does a community need?

Here Tomasello and we stand side by side.

• Tomasello: without the willingness to enforce norms, a group and its “we” could hardly be maintained.
• Our reading: to celebrate punishment as a virtue is to present coercion as a kindness. Moderate, reliable punishment that is experienced as fair can stabilise cooperation; an excess of it destroys it.
• Where we meet: in measure and in role. Tomasello’s uninvolved third party is precisely not the offended person taking revenge. The question then is no longer “punishment, yes or no?”, but: who punishes, how much – and are the reasons conveyed?

An order that conveys its reasons needs less coercion. Harald Alke put this as a maxim: laws should serve human beings, not human beings the lawmakers.

What does research say today?

• Early helping is well documented – in laboratories and in different cultures, even if its extent and form differ.
• The role of socialisation is given more weight today than in Tomasello’s early work (Dahl & Brownell 2019). He himself later extended his theory into a natural history of morality in which obligation and fairness emerge from cooperation (Tomasello 2016).
• Understanding and helping are linked – weakly, but consistently: children who better understand what others think help somewhat more often (Imuta et al. 2016). Understanding, of course, also serves deception.
• Criticism: in the same book, the primatologist Joan Silk countered that great apes care far less about the welfare of others than some interpretations suggest – a reminder not to gloss over the differences between humans and apes.

What did Tobias O. R. Alke write about this in 2017?

In Ausgewählte Perspektiven des Altruismus (“Selected Perspectives on Altruism”, 2017), Tomasello is the second perspective from anthropology. Tobias O. R. Alke read him as evidence for the prosocial nature of human beings and for a solidarity that grows out of cooperation rather than coercion.

Checking against the original shows: the core holds. Some attributions do not: in Tomasello, the helpfulness of young children is precisely not instilled by upbringing; chimpanzees do retaliate; mindreading is not empathy; and Tomasello considers punishment part of human cooperation. Where the 2017 work speaks of the “capacity for differentiation” (Differenzierungsvermögen), it means the ability to see connections as a whole – not intelligence or education; according to the author, it can be lost precisely among the educated, through specialisation and received doctrine. The new edition notes this.

What does this mean in practice?

• No need to reward helpfulness. Children help of their own accord – recognition is enough, rewards can do harm.
• Explain rather than command. Whoever understands the consequences for others internalises the rule.
• Make cooperation possible. Shared tasks to which everyone contributes something are the place where consideration grows.
• Protect trust. It is the foundation on which community stands – and every abuse damages it.
• With punishment, mind the measure. Fair, reliable, reasoned – never out of revenge.

Related terms

Prosocial nature of human beings · Veneer theory (de Waal) · Reciprocity · Altruism · Empathy · Solidarity through the division of labour (Durkheim) · Community that strengthens us

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By Tobias O. R. Alke