Igor Grossmann, PhD
@igi
Professor of psychology. Study culture and societal change, wisdom, good judgment (and lack thereof), forecasting, and new methods. Forecasting Collaborative founder | 🇺🇦🇩🇪🇺🇸🇨🇦 Psych Inquiry Editor. igorgrossmann.com OnWisdompodcast.com
An AI babysitter for humanity, or an AI toddler we want to nurture? One of many questions at last month's Dagstuhl seminar on Social AI, hosted by @lucie-nlp.bsky.social @tomerullman.bsky.social , @maartensap.bsky.social & @jennhu.bsky.social 🧵
The work: metacognitive foundations of judgment under uncertainty, forecasting, and cultural evolution. The road here ran through Konstanz (CASCB, hosted by Wolfgang Gaissmaier) and St. Gallen (IBT-HSG, hosted by Tobias Ebert).
After three months on the road, I'm finally putting the bags down for a bit — Freiburg, for the next month, on an Alexander von Humboldt Research Award. A short thread on landing here 🧵
New paper with the amazing Eugene Ji & @amirhkarimi.bsky.social "Metacognition Should Be the Scientific Framework for Bounded and Effective Self-Governance in Generative AI" LINK: arxiv.org/abs/2605.23981 #metacognition #LLM #selfgovernance
3/ Bonus highlight: visits from several @UWaterloo psychology students. 🎓
A presto, Firenze. 🇮🇹 Spent May 2026 as a Visiting Fellow at the @eui-eu.bsky.social Robert Schuman Centre @eui-schuman.bsky.social, during EUI's 50th anniversary. Fiesole's hills, Renaissance Florence, and conversations on science for policy. Still processing it all.
7/ We propose four design principles for measuring metacognitive constructs, both for IH and others: Contextual specificity Event reconstruction (real, not hypothetical) Accessibility (binary chains over Likert) Model within-person variability
5/ The headline finding: 74–81% of variance in IH was within-person. Intellectual humility looks more like a state than a trait. The same person is humble when wrong, arrogant when right. That's most of the signal.
3/ Our alternative — situated behavioral measurement. Don't ask who you are. Ask what you did. Recall a recent disagreement → six binary probes ("Did you listen carefully? How much?") → repeat for three different events (one wrong, one right, one freely chosen).
1/ We've been measuring intellectual humility wrong. Most scales ask "are you intellectually humble?" but the people least humble are the most miscalibrated about it. They overclaim. The #humilityparadox. Out today in Behavior Research Methods. Here's what we did instead. 🧵
What might a "wise" AI look like? How would we build one? Tomorrow 11:00–13:00 CEST Hybrid: EUI Florence + Zoom Free, I will be at @eui-eu.bsky.social to talk on benchmarking wisdom and metacognitive AI architectures. With discussant Claire Boine. Register: www.eui.eu/events?id=58...
1/ We're hiring a postdoc in the Wisdom & Culture Lab @uwaterloopsych.bsky.social to lead a new SSHRC-funded project on cultural narratives & decision-making. Fall '26 / Winter '27 start. 🧵
Intelligence is processing 10,000 transactions a minute. Wisdom is knowing which 3 failed. 3 weeks in India. 7 talks on AI, metacognition, and wisdom under radical uncertainty. What I learned — and what the audiences taught me. 🧵
Enjoyed talking on #AIwisdom at Jnana Prabhodini and IISER in Pune, India.
The rebuttals are FIRE! 🔥 We have serious, rigorous pushback and commentary from major voices in the field. Hear what Baron-Cohen, @utafrith.bsky.social , @gernsbacherlab.bsky.social, Joe Gough, Patrick Dwyer & others have to say about the debate!
OUT NOW: The highly controversial issue of Psychological Inquiry (Vol. 36, Issue 4) is live! Are we rethinking everything we know about autism? In our newest target article, @travislacroix.bsky.social argues that the "Theory of Mind" paradigm in #autism research is actually pseudoscience. 🧠 🧵👇
3/3 As the figure shows, applying a wisdom lens to AI helps regulate intractable problems, making systems more robust, explainable, cooperative, and safe. Let's move beyond static alignment! 👇
Our article also serves as a primer for junior scholars for conducting research on cultural change, aiming to empower scientists to move beyond the business-as-usual retrospective cross-sectional approaches to studying culture and social change (see Box 1).
🚨 New Paper Alert 🚨 "Understanding & Predicting Cultural Change" is accepted at Advances in Experimental Social Psychology! Varnum & I argue that Psychology cannot afford to be blind to time. We need to move from cross-sectional snapshots to dynamic time-series movies. 🧵👇
Wrapping up the year feeling very grateful for the brilliant team at the Wisdom & Culture Lab (plus alumni!). End-of-term outing to Toronto’s St. Lawrence Market + the Distillery District—great convos, great company, great snacks. Happy Holidays! 🎓✨🍁
Research can feel like shouting into the void. I’m deeply grateful that Emma Buchtel, Xu Jingya, & Betul Turel built on our “wise reasoning” work to tackle cultural diversity. They presented a large-scale study proposal at the 2025 @psychscience.bsky.social Global Summit. #culturaldiversity
2 years ago I was critical of our field’s “big intervention mindset:" pre-post studies, no prediction, no generalizability, zero modeling of temporal change. Since then: work on When Expert Predictions Fail , ecological fallacies in claims about “change,” and formal modeling tutorials.
Back in Portugal 🇵🇹 for #SESP2025 — and for the first time, #SESP itself is happening in Europe (Lisbon). This Saturday, 3:45–4:45 PM → Room Milão Chairing a symposium on #intellectual #humility in the #wild: #polarization, rural disputes, and #forecasting #societal #progress.
5/ Our companion ERSP review shows why the field got stuck: Too many studies confuse between-person differences (“wise vs. less wise”) with within-person change (“how to become wiser”). www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1... Classic ecological fallacy.
4/ Instead: Wisdom = a dynamic network of #intellectualhumility, #perspective-taking, #compromise, & recognition of #change. It ebbs and flows with context. #NetworkScience
2/ We now decided to use more mature dynamic modelling systems to look at factors that may promote #within-person #growth What did predict wiser reasoning months later? 👉 Self-distancing: stepping back, taking an outsider’s view. Not social support. Not “finding meaning.” #SelfDistancing
🚨 New paper out in JEP: General! psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-... Does adversity make us wiser? Spoiler: Not by default.
New Issue Alert: #Psychological #Inquiry, Vol. 36 (3), featuring the #open-access target article by Melody M. Chao: Introducing the ALPs Model for cultural competence. Read it here: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... Full issue: www.tandfonline.com/toc/hpli20/36/3#OpenAccess Check it out & share.
8/10 Cross-checks: Effects replicate when strategies aren’t framed as exclusive, and in small-scale societies using oral interviews.