PhdFit
Resume-aware faculty matching

Find professors who actually fit you

Review faculty evidence in public, then use the workspace to turn your background into a shortlist, outreach, and meeting prep.

Profile-awarePaper evidenceSix agents
Leda Cosmides

Leda Cosmides

· Distinguished Professor

University of California, Santa Barbara · Anthropology

Active 1981–2025

h-index75
Citations39.3k
Papers14815 last 5y
Funding$3.3M

Academic metrics are sourced from OpenAlex and public funding records; values may differ from Google Scholar.

Faculty page
See your match with Leda Cosmides — sign in to PhdFit.Sign in

About

Leda Cosmides is a professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara, within the Department of Anthropology. Her specialization is indicated through her departmental affiliation, and her contact information includes an email address (cosmides@psych.ucsb.edu) and a departmental webpage. The page does not provide specific details about her research focus, background, or key contributions, but her role as a professor suggests involvement in teaching and research within her field.

Research topics

  • Political Science
  • Psychology
  • Social psychology
  • Economics
  • Sociology
  • Computer Science
  • Microeconomics
  • Law
  • Philosophy
  • Epistemology

Selected publications

  • Cross-cultural invariances in the architecture of shame

    Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2018-09-10 · 195 citations

    articleOpen access

    Significance This set of experiments shows that in 15 traditional small-scale societies there is an extraordinarily close correspondence between ( i ) the intensity of shame felt if one exhibited specific acts or traits and ( ii ) the magnitude of devaluation expressed in response to those acts or traits by local audiences, and even foreign audiences. Three important and widely acknowledged sources of cultural variation between communities—geographic proximity, linguistic similarity, and religio…

    PublisherOA PDFDOI

  • Invariances in the architecture of pride across small-scale societies

    Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2018-08-01 · 97 citations

    articleOpen access

    Significance It has been proposed that one key function of pride is to guide behavior in ways that would increase others’ valuation of the individual. To incline choice, the pride system must compute for a potential action an anticipated pride intensity that tracks the magnitude of the approval or deference that the action would generate among local audiences. Data from industrial mass societies support this expectation. However, it is presently not known whether those data reflect cultural evol…

    PublisherOA PDFDOI

  • The ecological rationality of helping others: Potential helpers integrate cues of recipients' need and willingness to sacrifice

    Evolution and Human Behavior · 2018-07-23 · 45 citations

    article
    PublisherDOI

  • A moral trade-off system produces intuitive judgments that are rational and coherent and strike a balance between conflicting moral values

    Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2022 · 36 citations

    Senior authorCorresponding

    How does the mind make moral judgments when the only way to satisfy one moral value is to neglect another? Moral dilemmas posed a recurrent adaptive problem for ancestral hominins, whose cooperative social life created multiple responsibilities to others. For many dilemmas, striking a balance between two conflicting values (a compromise judgment) would have promoted fitness better than neglecting one value to fully satisfy the other (an extreme judgment). We propose that natural selection favore…

    PublisherDOI

  • The Evolution of Moral Cognition

    2018-11-02 · 33 citations

    book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

    Natural selection produces cognitive systems that are well designed for solving ancestral adaptive problems. This principle implies that interacting with others will be regulated by sophisticated cognitive systems in a group-living species, like our own. Here we explain how evolutionary game theory is used to identify ancestral problems of social interaction and what counted as adaptive solutions to these problems during our evolutionary past. We start with a detailed examination of selection pr…

    PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

Frequent coauthors

  • John Tooby

    University of California, Santa Barbara

    151 shared

  • Daniel Sznycer

    Oklahoma State University Oklahoma City

    33 shared

  • Robert T. Knight

    University of California, Berkeley

    20 shared

  • Andrew W. Delton

    Stony Brook University

    17 shared

  • Aaron Sell

    Heidelberg University

    17 shared

  • Valerie E. Stone

    16 shared

  • Neal E. A. Kroll

    16 shared

  • Stanley B. Klein

    University of California, Santa Barbara

    14 shared

Similar researchers at University of California, Santa Barbara

  • Resume-aware match score
  • Save to shortlist
  • AI-drafted outreach

See your match with Leda Cosmides

PhdFit ranks faculty by your research interests, methods, and publications — grounded in their actual work, not templates.

Sign in to PhdFitHow it works
  • Free to start
  • No credit card
  • 30-second signup