The Evolution of Agency: Behavioral Organization from Lizards to Humans

A leading developmental psychologist proposes an evolutionary pathway to human psychological agency.

Nature  cannot build organisms biologically prepared for every contingency they  might possibly encounter. Instead, Nature builds some organisms to  function as feedback control systems that pursue goals, make informed  behavioral decisions about how best to pursue those goals in the current  situation, and then monitor behavioral execution for effectiveness.  Nature builds psychological agents. In a bold new theoretical proposal,  Michael Tomasello advances a typology of the main forms of psychological  agency that emerged on the evolutionary pathway to human beings.
 
Tomasello  outlines four main types of psychological agency and describes them in  evolutionary order of emergence. First was the goal-directed agency of  ancient vertebrates, then came the intentional agency of ancient  mammals, followed by the rational agency of ancient great apes, ending  finally in the socially normative agency of ancient humans. Each new  form of psychological organization represented increased complexity in  the planning, decision-making, and executive control of behavior. Each  also led to new types of experience of the environment and, in some  cases, of the organism’s own psychological functioning, leading  ultimately to humans’ experience of an objective and normative world  that governs all of their thoughts and actions. Together, these  proposals constitute a new theoretical framework that both broadens and  deepens current approaches in evolutionary psychology.