Becoming Human
The closure of Tomasello's forty-year research programme.
Becoming Human traces how human uniqueness -- shared intentionality, normativity, cumulative culture -- emerges ontogenetically in children through a sequence of increasingly complex forms of cooperation: joint intentionality with a partner, then collective intentionality with a group, then the full moral and institutional framework of human societies.
The account is developmental rather than purely evolutionary, tracking what happens in the first six years of life.
It is the most complete statement of Tomasello's vision: we become human not through individual cognitive breakthroughs but through cooperative engagements that restructure how we think, communicate, and hold each other accountable.
Central argument
Tomasello argues that what makes humans distinctively human — shared intentionality, normative thinking, cumulative culture — is not the product of individual cognitive evolution but emerges through a developmental sequence in the first six years of life. Children first form joint intentionality with individual partners, then scale to collective intentionality with groups, and finally internalize the full moral and institutional framework of human societies. Human cognition is therefore constitutively cooperative: we do not think our way into collaboration, we collaborate our way into thought.
Critique
Tomasello's account is heavily weighted toward ontogeny — what unfolds in child development — but the mechanisms by which joint intentionality scales from dyadic interaction to large, anonymous, institutionally complex societies remain underspecified. The leap from shared attention between two children to the normative scaffolding of modern institutions involves coordination problems of a qualitatively different order, and critics from evolutionary game theory and institutional economics argue he underestimates the role of enforcement, incentive structures, and conflict in sustaining collective intentionality at scale. The developmental lens, while illuminating, risks making cooperation appear more organic and less contested than it actually is in practice.
Why it matters for product
For a CPO, the core implication is structural: if genuinely shared intentionality — not nominal alignment — is the precondition for cumulative cultural output, then product team design is not an HR question but a cognitive architecture question. Discovery rituals, joint decision frameworks, and shared representation of user problems are not process overhead; they are the mechanisms through which a team develops the collective intentionality that makes compounding product knowledge possible. Tomasello also explains why accountability norms must be co-constructed rather than imposed: teams that internalize shared standards outperform those operating under external metrics precisely because the normative structure becomes self-regulating.