Michael Tomasello (born January 18, 1950) is an American developmental and comparative psychologist, as well as a linguist. He is professor of psychology at Duke University.  Earning many prizes and awards from the end of the 1990s onward, he is considered one of today’s most authoritative developmental and comparative psychologists. He is « one of the few scientists worldwide who is acknowledged as an expert in multiple disciplines ».

His « pioneering research on the origins of social cognition has led to revolutionary insights in both developmental psychology and primate cognition.  He was a professor of psychology and anthropology at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, US, during the 1980s and 1990s.

Subsequently, he moved to Germany to become co-director of Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, and later also honorary professor at University of Leipzig and co-director of the Wolfgang Kohler Primate Research Center.

2016 he became Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience, Duke University, where he now is James F. Bonk Distinguished Professor. He works on child language acquisition as a crucially important aspect of the enculturation process. He is a critic of Noam Chomsky’s universal grammar, rejecting the idea of an innate universal grammar and instead proposing a functional theory of language development (sometimes called the social-pragmatic theory of language acquisition or usage-based approach to language acquisition) in which children learn linguistic structures through intention-reading and pattern-finding in their discourse interactions with others.