TY - BOOK ID - 588293 TI - A natural history of human thinking PY - 2014 SN - 9780674724778 0674724771 9780674726369 9780674986831 0674726367 0674727568 9780674727564 PB - Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University Press DB - UniCat KW - Cognitive psychology KW - Developmental psychology KW - Cognition KW - Evolutionary psychology. KW - Psychology, Comparative. KW - Social aspects. KW - Behavior, Comparative KW - Comparative behavior KW - Comparative psychology KW - Ethology, Comparative KW - Intelligence of animals KW - Zoology KW - Animal behavior KW - Animal intelligence KW - Animal psychology KW - Human behavior KW - Instinct KW - Psychology KW - Human evolution KW - Evolutionary psychology KW - Psychology, Comparative KW - Social aspects KW - Ontwikkelingspsychologie KW - Cognitieve psychologie KW - Cognition-Social aspects. UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:588293 AB - Tool-making or culture, language or religious belief: ever since Darwin, thinkers have struggled to identify what fundamentally differentiates human beings from other animals. Michael Tomasello weaves his twenty years of comparative studies of humans and great apes into a compelling argument that cooperative social interaction is the key to our cognitive uniqueness. Tomasello maintains that our prehuman ancestors, like today's great apes, were social beings who could solve problems by thinking. But they were almost entirely competitive, aiming only at their individual goals. As ecological changes forced them into more cooperative living arrangements, early humans had to coordinate their actions and communicate their thoughts with collaborative partners. Tomasello's "shared intentionality hypothesis" captures how these more socially complex forms of life led to more conceptually complex forms of thinking. In order to survive, humans had to learn to see the world from multiple social perspectives, to draw socially recursive inferences, and to monitor their own thinking via the normative standards of the group. Even language and culture arose from the preexisting need to work together and coordinate thoughts. A Natural History of Human Thinking is the most detailed scientific analysis to date of the connection between human sociality and cognition. ER -