Igor Grossmann

Social & Cultural Psychologist · Computational Social Scientist

Professor of Psychology at the University of Waterloo, where I direct the Wisdom and Culture Lab and lead the international Wise Judgment Consortium. I study how people, societies, and AI systems navigate uncertainty: what makes judgment wise, how culture shapes it, and how well we can forecast societal change. My work combines experiments and large multi-country studies with archival time-series analysis, forecasting tournaments, NLP, and large language models. It appears in Science, Nature Human Behaviour, PNAS, and the Annual Review of Psychology.

Editor-in-Chief, Psychological Inquiry

Projects

Wisdom

What makes judgment wise, and can it be trained? We study wisdom as metacognition in context: how perspective-taking, intellectual humility, and self-distancing vary across situations and cultures, and how to measure and cultivate them.

Cultural Change

Cultures never stand still. Using archival time series spanning decades to centuries, we quantify how values, norms, and behavior shift across societies, and test why.

Forecasting

Is humanity progressing or regressing? How do experts and the public estimate changes in the ever changing world? My colleagues and I evaluate accuracy of forecasts, comparing different models against actual change over time.

Methods & AI

AI is both a tool and a subject in my work: we use large language models and multilingual NLP to analyze narratives across cultures, and study whether AI systems can show the metacognition that wise judgment requires.

News

"Navigating the unknown: The sociocultural and metacognitive architecture of wisdom" - New Annual Review of Psychology chapter with Nic Weststrate, and the basis for On Wisdom's five-episode special series this fall.
"Psychology professor Igor Grossmann awarded Humboldt Prize" - University of Waterloo news on the 2026 Humboldt Research Award, which also funds long-term research partnerships with Germany.
"Imagining and building wise machines: The centrality of AI metacognition" - New Trends in Cognitive Sciences paper with Samuel Johnson, Yoshua Bengio and colleagues on why AI systems need metacognition to act wisely.
"What Wise People Know (Hidden Brain)" - A Hidden Brain conversation on how wisdom, a notoriously hard quality to define, can be measured and practised.
"Can I Give You Some Advice? (Nautilus)" - Nautilus on our 12-country study: in individualistic and collectivist societies alike, people prefer to trust their own judgment over others' advice.
"Süddeutsche Zeitung: Decisions from Ecuador to Berlin" - German coverage of the same study: people facing hard decisions prefer their own inner voice, and this preference is not unique to the West.
"Be humble. It's good for learning and your relationships." - Washington Post piece (September 2024) on the science of intellectual humility, featuring the lab's research.
"Dear AI: This is what happens when you ask an algorithm for relationship advice" - BBC Future on whether AI can give wise advice, featuring the lab's work on wisdom and large language models.
"Social scientists look to AI models to study human behavior " - Axios article on the new Science perspective about AI-assisted social science research.
"Illeism: The ancient trick to help you think more wisely" - BBC coverage of the research on training wisdom-related meta-cognition via illeist journaling.
"Generative AI: A plagiarism machine, or a creator of equal opportunity?" - QS magazine interview on opportunities and perils of Gen AI for higher education.