Michael Tomasello

Michael Tomasello is the most cited scholar in the comparative study of human and great ape psychology (h-index = 158). He is founding director of the Wolfgang Koehler Primate Research Center in Leipzig, Germany, where he has conducted seminal studies of social cognition, communication, cooperation, and social learning in the four great apes and human children of different ages. He has championed the view that while great apes and humans share many aspects of their cognition and sociality, humans have evolved unique skills and motivations for interacting with others cooperatively. These capacities of so-called shared intentionality essentially transform great ape psychology into human psychology.