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Leda Cosmides
Also known as: Cosmides
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Evolutionary Psychology | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy iep.utm.edu 30 facts
procedureFunctional analysis, as proposed by John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, is a six-step procedure for identifying adaptations: (1) use evolutionary considerations to model past adaptive problems, (2) generate hypotheses about how these problems manifested under ancestral selection pressures, (3) formulate a 'computational theory' specifying the information processing problems to be solved, (4) use the computational theory as a heuristic to generate testable hypotheses about the structure of cognitive programs, (5) rule out alternative explanations that do not involve natural selection, and (6) test the adaptationist hypotheses by checking if modern humans possess the postulated cognitive mechanisms.
procedureLeda Cosmides and John Tooby compared human performance on unfamiliar social rules versus unfamiliar non-social rules to test if familiarity explains performance differences in Wason Selection Tasks.
quoteCosmides and Tooby (2003) identify a list of day-to-day problems faced by human ancestors that shaped the human mind: “giving birth, winning social support from band members, remembering the locations of edible plants, hitting game animals with projectiles, …, recognizing emotional expressions, protecting family members, maintaining mating relationships, …, assessing the character of self and others, causing impregnation, acquiring language, maintaining friendships, thwarting antagonists, and so on.”
measurementIn experiments conducted by Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, 75% of subjects correctly answered the unfamiliar social Wason Selection Task, while only 21% correctly answered the unfamiliar non-social Wason Selection Task.
measurementIn a study by Cosmides and Tooby (1992), 67% of subjects chose logically incorrect cards in response to a switched social problem, while only 4% did so for a switched non-social problem.
quoteJohn Tooby and Leda Cosmides stated in 1992 that "every feature of every phenotype is fully and equally codetermined by the interaction of the organism’s genes … and its ontogenetic environments."
claimEvolutionary psychologists, as described by John Tooby and Leda Cosmides in 1990, do not claim that human behavior or culture is uniform globally, but rather that the genes required for cognitive adaptations and the cognitive adaptations themselves are universal, even if resulting behaviors vary.
claimCosmides and Tooby’s research on cheater detection is considered a flagship example of Evolutionary Psychology.
claimJohn Tooby and Leda Cosmides define evidence of an adaptation as a reliably developing feature of a species' architecture that solves an adaptive problem with reliability, precision, efficiency, and economy.
claimElsa Ermer, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby acknowledge that the mind contains functionally specialized programs that are relatively content-free and domain-general, but argue these can only regulate behavior adaptively if they work in tandem with content-rich, domain-specialized programs.
procedureTo test the cheater detection hypothesis, Leda Cosmides switched the logical roles of the P/not-P and Q/not-Q cards in both the cassava root/tattoo social contract problem and the duiker meat/ostrich shell non-social problem.
referenceLeda Cosmides and John Tooby (1992) authored the paper 'Cognitive Adaptations for Social Exchange', which is considered a classic work on the topic of cheater detection.
quoteLeda Cosmides and John Tooby stated in 1987: "In the rush to apply evolutionary insights to a science of human behavior, many researchers have made a conceptual ‘wrong turn,’ … [which] has consisted of attempting to apply evolutionary theory directly to the level of manifest behavior, rather than using it as a heuristic guide for the discovery of innate psychological mechanisms."
referenceLeda Cosmides designed an unfamiliar Wason Selection Task involving a social contract rule: "If a man eats cassava root, then he must have a tattoo on his face," accompanied by a story about Polynesian island sexual mores and aphrodisiacs.
claimLeda Cosmides hypothesized that if a cheater detection module exists in the human cognitive system, subjects should select cards representing cheating even when those selections correspond to logically incorrect answers.
referenceLeda Cosmides designed an unfamiliar Wason Selection Task involving a non-social rule: "If you eat duiker meat, then you have found an ostrich eggshell," accompanied by a story about anthropologists hypothesizing that duikers feed on ostrich shells.
claimCosmides and Tooby (1994) assert that the human mind lacks cognitive procedures dedicated to solving problems that would not have enhanced the survival or reproduction of Pleistocene hunter-gatherers, which explains why modern human performance on such tasks is poor and uneven.
perspectiveLeda Cosmides and John Tooby argued that natural selection did not endow the human mind with a general conditional reasoning capacity because testing abstract logical rules would not have had adaptive value in the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness (EEA).
claimLeda Cosmides and John Tooby define a domain-general architecture as a system that lacks content, such as domain-specific knowledge or procedures, to guide it toward solving an adaptive problem.
quoteLeda Cosmides and John Tooby stated in 1987: "[t]o speak of natural selection as selecting for ‘behaviors’ is a convenient shorthand, but it is misleading usage. … Natural selection cannot select for behavior per se; it can only select for mechanisms that produce behavior."
claimLeda Cosmides and John Tooby argue that domain-general systems cannot solve biological problems of routine complexity in a timely manner because they lack domain-specific rules of relevance, procedural knowledge, or privileged hypotheses to restrict their search of a problem space.
quoteTooby and Cosmides (1989) stated: "the missing link between evolutionary theory and manifest behavior."
quoteTooby and Cosmides (1990a) state that evolutionary psychologists are not committed to "a form of ‘genetic determinism,’ if by that one means the idea that genes determine everything, immune from an environmental influence."
claimResearch conforming to Leda Cosmides and John Tooby’s theoretical model includes work on cheater detection, David Buss’ work on sex differences in jealousy, and Irwin Silverman and Marion Eals’ work on sex differences in spatial abilities.
referenceLeda Cosmides and John Tooby wrote 'Origins of Domain Specificity: The Evolution of Functional Organization,' published in the 1994 book Mapping the Mind: Domain Specificity in Cognition and Culture.
claimLeda Cosmides and John Tooby describe the mind as a Swiss Army knife containing evolved, functionally specialized computational devices, including face recognition systems, a language acquisition device, mindreading systems, navigation specializations, animate motion recognition, cheater detection mechanisms, and mechanisms that govern sexual attraction.
claimLeda Cosmides and John Tooby observed that robust and replicable content effects in Wason Selection Tasks were found only for rules that related terms recognizable as benefits and costs/requirements in the format of a standard social contract.
claimLeda Cosmides and John Tooby argued that humans are better at testing social contract rules, defined as 'If person A provides the requested benefit to or meets the requirement of person or group B, then B will provide the rationed benefit to A,' than at testing conditional rules that do not describe such conditions.
claimLeda Cosmides and John Tooby proposed that natural selection designed a specific module for detecting individuals who accept benefits without reciprocating in social exchange situations.
claimLeda Cosmides and John Tooby argued that the content effect found in Wason Selection Tasks is due to the fact that some tasks involve a social contract rule.
Evolutionary psychology - Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org 6 facts
quoteJohn Tooby and Leda Cosmides argued: "The psyche evolved to generate adaptive rather than repetitive behavior, and hence critically analyzes the behavior of those surrounding it in highly structured and patterned ways, to be used as a rich (but by no means the only) source of information out of which to construct a 'private culture' or individually tailored adaptive system; in consequence, this system may or may not mirror the behavior of others in any given respect."
claimAnthropologist John Tooby and psychologist Leda Cosmides define evolutionary psychology as a scientific attempt to assemble a single, logically integrated research framework for the psychological, social, and behavioral sciences by incorporating evolutionary sciences and revising existing research practices.
referenceEvolutionary psychologists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby participated in a conversation titled "Stone Age Minds."
referenceLeda Cosmides and John Tooby authored the chapter 'Cognitive Adaptations for Social Exchange' in the book 'The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture', published by Oxford University Press in 1992.
claimLeda Cosmides and John Tooby's 1992 book, The Adapted Mind, helped usher in the modern era of evolutionary psychology.
referenceJohn Tooby and Leda Cosmides argued in 1989 that the human mind consists of many domain-specific psychological adaptations, some of which may constrain what cultural material is learned or taught.
(PDF) On the function of consciousness - an adaptationist perspective academia.edu 1 fact
claimThe integration of evolutionary explanations into consciousness studies has been developing since the mid-1990s, though rigorous adaptationist accounts remain scarce according to researchers John Tooby and Leda Cosmides.
Psychedelics, Sociality, and Human Evolution frontiersin.org 1 fact
claimResearchers including Tooby, Devore, Cosmides, Barrett, Pinker, Bertolotti, and Magnani argue that humans evolved to specialize in a 'cognitive niche' to explain their unique zoological features.