---
title: "Research Notes: Shared Intentionality and Cumulative Culture"
slug: shared-intentionality-cumulative-culture
lang: en
created: 2026-11-04
modified: 2026-11-04
version: 2026-11-04
authors:
  - id: david-a-renelt
    role: human
  - id: kimi-k31-pro
    role: ai
tags:
  - reference
  - culture
  - evolution
  - communication
series: null
type: reference
related:
  - consciousness
summary: "O'Madagain and Tomasello's coordination account of human culture: shared intentionality, cooperative communication, pedagogy, and coordinating on reasons — support for cumulative culture, not proof of a narrative-self origin."
---

# Research Notes: Shared Intentionality and Cumulative Culture

## Beyond social learning alone

O'Madagain and Tomasello argue that biological accounts of culture focus too exclusively on social learning and too little on cultural coordination. Their proposal locates distinctive human culture in skills and motivations for coordinating with one another around different kinds of action and information — shared intentionality.

Their sequence has several levels. Early forms support collaborative activity and pedagogy based on cooperative communication. Later forms support collaborative innovation and normatively structured pedagogy. At the capstone, people coordinate not only on joint actions and shared beliefs but on **reasons for beliefs and actions**. That coordination is proposed to power especially rapid innovation and stable cumulative cultural evolution.

## The ratchet

The related “ratchet” account of cumulative culture asks how cultural products are preserved well enough to be improved rather than repeatedly lost. Human social learning in this framework is not mere copying: teaching, cooperative communication, conformity, shared intentionality, and normative structure help innovations persist and accumulate.

Animal cultures remain part of the comparison. The claim is not that other animals have no traditions or social learning, but that human coordination supports a distinctive scale and stability of accumulation.

## What this does not support

- **Not proof that narrative selfhood causes cumulative culture.** The paper's mechanism is coordination and shared intentionality, not the narrative-self premise.
- **Not proof that technology follows from communication alone.** The account includes pedagogy, norms, reasons, and collaborative innovation.
- **Not a denial of animal culture.** The distinction concerns the organization and cumulative power of cultural learning.

## How the corpus uses it

This is the strongest established neighbor for the proposed leap from shared stories to cumulative technology. The corpus's **externalized fate** hypothesis must be marked as a bridge: narrative selfhood may make aims and ownership portable, while shared-intentionality research explains how people coordinate around the resulting projects. The social formation of the narrator is covered in [Research Notes: Mead's Social Self](social-self-mead.md) and [Research Notes: Self-Consciousness and Intersubjectivity](intersubjectivity-self-consciousness.md).

## Sources

- Cathal O'Madagain and Michael Tomasello, “Shared intentionality, reason-giving and the evolution of human culture,” *Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B* 377 (2022). [DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2020.0320](https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2020.0320). Abstract verified through Crossref on 2026-11-04; publisher full text was access-blocked in this pass.
- Claudio Tennie, Josep Call, and Michael Tomasello, “Ratcheting up the ratchet: on the evolution of cumulative culture,” *Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B* 364 (2009). [DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2009.0052](https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2009.0052).
- Tomasello, Kruger, and Ratner, “Cultural learning,” *Behavioral and Brain Sciences* 16 (1993). [DOI: 10.1017/S0140525X0003123X](https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X0003123X).