# Leda Cosmides Leda Cosmides (b. 1957) is an American psychologist who, with [[John Tooby]], founded [[Evolutionary Psychology]] as a distinct field. Their 1992 paper "Cognitive Adaptations for Social Exchange" demonstrated that humans have an evolved "cheater detection" module—we're far better at logical reasoning when it involves detecting social rule violations than with abstract logic problems (the Wason selection task). Cosmides and Tooby direct the Center for Evolutionary Psychology at UC Santa Barbara. Their work established the core EP framework: the mind as a collection of domain-specific modules shaped by [[Natural Selection]] to solve ancestral adaptive problems. Their edited volume *The Adapted Mind* (1992) became the field's foundational text. [[Steven Pinker]] popularized their ideas in *[[How the Mind Works]]*. ## Key Contributions | Contribution | Significance | |--------------|--------------| | Cheater detection module | Social reasoning is domain-specific | | *The Adapted Mind* (1992) | Foundational EP text | | Modular mind framework | Mind as adapted problem-solvers | ## Quotes <!-- QueryToSerialize: LIST FROM #type/quote AND [[Leda Cosmides]] WHERE public_note = true SORT file.name ASC --> ## Books <!-- QueryToSerialize: LIST FROM #type/book AND [[Leda Cosmides]] WHERE public_note = true SORT file.name ASC --> ## Related - [[John Tooby]] - [[Evolutionary Psychology]] - [[Steven Pinker]] - [[Modularity of Mind]] ## References - Cosmides & Tooby. "Cognitive Adaptations for Social Exchange" (1992) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leda_Cosmides