Featured Former Fellow – Michael Tomasello 10/7/25

Title: Agency and the Organization of Human Experience

Abstract: In modern cognitive science, humans’ experience of the world is described and explained independent of their behavioral decision making and action in it. But in evolution organisms experience the world in just the ways necessary to do what they need to do. It is difficult to see this guiding role of agency and action in contemporary humans because most of their psychological architecture evolved before the human species existed at all. Moreover, many of the unique features of human psychology derive from their capacity to form shared agencies (including cultures) with others and to self-regulate them normatively, processes mostly ignored in modern cognitive science. Over a century ago, the American pragmatists focused on evolution, agency, and culture, but they did not have the tools of modern evolutionary psychology to cash them out in empirical research and systematic theory. Modern cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and computational modeling would do well to incorporate this new evolutionary research and theory into their mostly non-agentive models.