BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1993) 16, 495-552 Printed in the United States of America Cultural learning Michael Tomasello Department of Psychology, Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30322 Electronic mail: [email protected] Ann Cale Kruger Department of Educational Foundations, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA 30303 Electronic mail: [email protected] Hilary Horn Ratner Department of Psychology, Wayne State University, Detroit, Ml 48202 Abstract: This target article presents a theory of human cultural learning. Cultural learning is identified with those instances of social learning in which intersubjectivity or perspective-taking plays a vital role, both in the original learning process and in the resulting cognitive product. Cultural learning manifests itself in three forms during human ontogeny: imitative learning, instructed learning, and collaborative learning - in that order. Evidence is provided that this progression arises from the developmental ordering of the underlying social-cognitive concepts and processes involved. Imitative learning relies on a concept of intentional agent and involves simple perspective-taking. Instructed learning relies on a concept of mental agent and involves alternating/coordinated perspective- taking (intersubjectivity). Collaborative learning relies on a concept of reflective agent and involves integrated perspective-taking (reflective intersubjectivity). A comparison of normal children, autistic children and wild and enculturated chimpanzees provides further evidence for these correlations between social cognition and cultural learning. Cultural learning is a uniquely human form of social learning that allows for a fidelity of transmission of behaviors and information among conspecifics not possible in other forms of social learning, thereby providing the psychological basis for cultural evolution. Keywords: animal cognition; attention; cognitive development; collaboration; cultural learning; culture; imitation; instruction; intontionality; intersubjectivity; social learning; theory of mind Many animal species live in complex social groups; only learning processes that ensure this fidelity serve to pre- humans live in cultures. Cultures are most clearly distin- vent information loss (the ratchet) and thus, in combina- guished from other forms of social organization by the tion with individual and collaborative inventiveness, form nature of their products - for example, material artifacts, the basis for cultural evolution. Human beings are able to social institutions, behavioral traditions, and languages. learn from one another in this way because they have very These cultural products share, among other things, the powerful, perhaps uniquely powerful, forms of social characteristic that they accumulate modifications over cognition. Human beings understand and take the per- time. Once a practice is begun by some member or spective of others in a manner and to a degree that allows members of a culture others acquire it relatively faith- them to participate more intimately than nonhuman ani- fully, but then modify it as needed to deal with novel mals in the knowledge and skills of conspecifics. exigencies. The modified practice is then acquired by This overall perspective is not new, of course, but others, including progeny, who may in turn add their own echoes a central theme in the work of Lev Vygotsky. On a modifications, and so on across generations. This accu- number of occasions Vygotsky (e.g., 1978) contrasted mulation of modifications over time is often called the sharply the learning of human children in the "cultural "ratchet-effect," because each modification stays firmly in line" of development with their learning (and that of place in the group until further modifications are made. Kohler's [1927] chimpanzees) in the "natural line" of No cultural products exhibiting anything like the ratchet development. The cultural line is characterized not only effect have ever been observed in the ontogenetically by the presence of culture, whose important role in acquired behaviors or products of nonhuman animals human ontogeny Vygotsky so clearly demonstrated, but (Tomasello 1990). also by the uniquely human capacity to acquire cultural The very large difference in product between animal products. The coevolution of culture and the capacity for and human societies may be most directly explained by a its acquisition is also a major theme of the newly emerging small but very important difference in process. Simply paradigm of cultural psychology (e.g., Bruner 1990; Cole put, human beings learn from one another in ways that 1989; Rogoff 1990; Shweder 1990; Wertsch 1985b). But, nonhuman animals do not. In particular, human beings following Vygotsky, cultural psychologists have so far "transmit" ontogenetically acquired behavior and infor- chosen to focus almost exclusively on the important role of mation, both within and across generations, with a much culture, neglecting for the most part what the individual higher degree of fidelity than other animal species. The organism brings to the process of enculturation. © 1993 Cambridge University Press 0140-525X193 S5.00+.00 495 Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. University of Basel Library, on 11 Jul 2017 at 10:48:47, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00031277 Tomasello et al.: Cultural learning In this target article we attempt to focus on the individ- ment is not. It is learning in which the learner is attempt- ual capacity for acquiring culture, that is to say, on the ing to learn not from another, but through another. This social-learning processes whereby human children ac- qualitative difference is possible because human beings quire the skills and conventions of those around them. are able, depending on one's choice of theory and termi- What is new in our account is an attempt to understand nology, to take the role of the other (Mead 1934), to take social learning in terms of the most recent research and the perspective of the other (Piaget 1932), to attribute theory on children's social cognition. We believe that as mental states to the other (Premack 1988), to simulate the children's understanding of other persons develops - as mental states of the other (Harris 1991), to engage in joint they learn to understand other persons in terms of their attention with the other (Bruner 1983), to engage in intentions and beliefs, or even in terms of a "theory of mindreading of the other (Whiten 1991), to understand mind" - new processes of social learning emerge. Be- the other as a "person" (Hobson, in press), or to partici- cause of their role in the transmission and creation of pate with the other intersubjectively (Trevarthen 1979b). cultural products, we refer to these uniquely human We will speak of "perspective-taking" when the learner is processes of social learning as cultural learning. attempting to see the situation from another person's point of view and of "intersubjectivity" when both the 1. Social learning and cultural learning learner and other person are doing this simultane- ously and reciprocally. In all cases, the nature of the As typically conceived, social learning is individual learn- perspective-taking attempt depends, in a way that we will ing that is influenced in some way by the social environ- spell out later, on how the other "person" is conceived.' ment (e.g., Bandura 1986). In many cases this influence It is also important in our definition of cultural learning may be minimal in terms of the actual learning processes that what is retained by the learner after the social involved, however. For example, young animals may interaction has terminated is still in essence social. Thus, follow their mother to a food source and then learn to in all cases of cultural learning the learner must internal- extract the food by themselves; or human adults may give ize into its own repertoire not just knowledge of the children objects which they then explore on their own. activity being performed by another person, but also In these cases the social environment provides exposure something of the social interaction itself- the demonstra- only; the actual learning processes are wholly individual tion or instructions given by an adult, for example. This in the sense that what is learned is learned through the process of internalization (or, in Rogoff's 1990 preferred youngster's direct interaction with the physical environ- terminology, "appropriation") is not something myste- ment. rious or magical, in our view, but simply a special mani- In other instances the social environment may play a festation of basic processes of learning. The difference is more active role, most importantly by drawing the juve- that in internalization an important part of what is being nile's attention to a specific object or location in the learned is the point of view of another person (the "voice' environment that it otherwise would not have noticed (so- of the other, in Bahktin's terminology; cf., Stone, in press; called local or stimulus enhancement; Thorpe 1956). For Wertsch 1991) - which may sometimes be intentional, example, a chimpanzee mother's nut-cracking activities and thus refer to some entity outside that person. The may draw a youngster's attention to the rock-hammer and important point for current purposes is that the cognitive the open nut, both left on the hard surface necessary for representation resulting from cultural