iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Igor Grossmann, PhD

On Wisdom @onwisdompodcast.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

What does it actually take to think wisely? On Wisdom digs into the empirical science of wisdom, judgment, and decision-making, and what it means for how we live. 🎧 Listen across Fireside, Apple Podcasts, and more here: www.onwisdompodcast.com

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Igor Grossmann, PhD @igi.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

You’ve been thinking about it (or at least your chatbot has). But are you getting anywhere? igorgrossmann.substack.com/p/youve-been...

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Igor Grossmann, PhD @igi.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

We're hiring research engineers, research associates & several postdocs at the Wisdom & Culture Lab @UWaterloo to build experiments, tools & models on how AI shapes human reasoning, decisions & culture. Psych, cogsci, ML/NLP, HCI & eng backgrounds welcome. uwaterloo.ca/wisdom-and-c...

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Igor Grossmann, PhD @igi.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Job-market season hot take: Ivy League + R1 schools (yes, Michigan and Stanford, looking at you 2) should stop requiring recommendation letters from all faculty applicants. I beg you, ask at shortlist stage! Otherwise you’re wasting everyone’s time, & incentivizing AI-slop letters. What’s the point?

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Igor Grossmann, PhD @igi.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

No Easy Answers - Decided to start a Substack in conjunction with the new @onwisdom.bsky.social special series on navigating uncertainty, technological, political, personal... Irony in arriving rather late here: Waterloo alumni helped create this platform. igorgrossmann.substack.com/subscribe?pa...

igorgrossmann.substack.com

Subscribe to No Easy Answers

Exploring how we think, disagree, and act when the world resists easy answers. Click to read No Easy Answers, by Igor Grossmann, a Substack publication. Launched 34 minutes ago.

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Igor Grossmann, PhD @igi.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Finally, Santhanagopalan, @bskybymidge.bsky.social , Risen & Kinzler respond. The larger question running through the issue: What would theories of human judgment look like if development were built in from the start? www.tandfonline.com/journals/hpl...

tandfonline.com

Psychological Inquiry

Psychological Inquiry publishes challenging theoretical work to advance psychology and the study of personality and social psychology.

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Igor Grossmann, PhD @igi.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Loreen Tisdall & Rui Mata ask what a genuinely developmental science of JDM requires. Tess Wild & @loeckenhoff.bsky.social broaden the lens across the life span. Liqi Zhu & Xiaosong Gai foreground construct validation across childhood.

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Igor Grossmann, PhD @igi.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

The conversation expands further: Tehila Kogut, Shaul Shalvi & Yoella Bereby-Meyer → social & moral decisions Michal Maimaran → children in the marketplace Oana Stanciu & Azzurra Ruggeri → building an integrated developmental JDM

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Igor Grossmann, PhD @igi.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Are developing minds simply “biases in the making”? @simyciri.bsky.social, Tomás Lejarraga & Ralph Hertwig argue for a different way of thinking about development. @arc-mpib.bsky.social @mpib-berlin.bsky.social @mgummerum.bsky.social & Yaniv Hanoch ask how small choices can shape big futures.

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Igor Grossmann, PhD @igi.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Nadia Chernyak asks what developmental science can reveal about cultural input vs. core cognitive competencies. Shoham Choshen-Hillel & Tom Gordon-Hecker extend the question to the origins of moral judgment and decision-making.

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Igor Grossmann, PhD @igi.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Across a decade of SJDM programs, research with children appeared in only 0.1% of talks and posters. The authors propose an Origins of Judgment and Decision-Making (OJDM) framework. 10 commentaries take up the challenge ↓

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Igor Grossmann, PhD @igi.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

What do we miss when the science of judgment & decision-making mostly begins in adulthood? A new Psych Inquiry target article by Santhanagopalan, @bskybymidge.bsky.social , Risen & Kinzler argues that childhood should be central (vs. supplemental) to JDM. doi.org/10.1080/1047...

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Igor Grossmann, PhD @igi.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

The @onwisdompodcast special lineup: 01 Legare · McAdams · Paul 02 Pennycook · Costello · Fleming 03 Glück · Ardelt · Jayawickreme 04 Glück · Kross · Kristjánsson 05 Jeste · Schwartz · Brienza Five episodes, built on a new Annual Review of Psychology doi.org/10.1146/annu...

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Igor Grossmann, PhD @igi.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

We’re hiring! Wisdom & Culture Lab @uwaterloo.ca seeks a Research Project Manager for a 12+ country project on cultural narratives, economic games & decision-making, via Wise Judgment Consortium. Please apply/share! 👇 uwaterloo.ca/wisdom-and-c... #AcademicJobs #ResearchJobs #CulturalPsychology

uwaterloo.ca

Job Ad! WAC lab is searching for a Research Project Manager | Wisdom and Culture Lab | University of Waterloo

Job Ad! WAC lab is searching for a Research Project Manager for Cultural Narratives, Economic Games, & Decision-making project.

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Igor Grossmann, PhD @igi.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

Concern with WEIRD cultures and behaviours does not only concern humans. It gets much worse when we look at the animal models and the study of non-human animal cognition, affect, and behavior. Incredibly proud of @jespinosa.bsky.social and colleagues for making this provocative, needed argument.

jespinosa.bsky.social

Julia Espinosa (@jespinosa.bsky.social)

Postdoc in comparative psychology, biology, & neuroscience @YorkU & @Harvard | Studying the nature & nurture shaping social behaviour in diverse dog populations 🐩🐕🐕‍🦺 | #ManyDogs Founder & Co-Director...

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Igor Grossmann, PhD @igi.bsky.social · 19/07/2026

Presenting at #ECP22 in Edinburgh: Wed 16:45 (Salisbury): Multilingual Topic Modeling for Cross-Cultural Research (for Y. Li who can't come due to visa). Thu 11:00 (St Trinnean): Intellectual humility & forecast accuracy. DM to connect. #CrossCulturalPsychology #Forecasting #Intellectualhumility

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Igor Grossmann, PhD @igi.bsky.social · 16/06/2026

3/ The one I keep returning to: a system that can mask its own abilities well enough that we can no longer test/ benchmark for them... A genuinely fun and intellectually stimulating crowd. Perhaps, "social" selected for a very social type of bunch of open-minded scholars.

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Igor Grossmann, PhD @igi.bsky.social · 16/06/2026

2/ The premise was open: what kind of social AI do we actually want, and do we want it at all? Nothing off the table. Camel and dog social intelligence. Hive minds. Trisolarans...

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Igor Grossmann, PhD @igi.bsky.social · 16/06/2026

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 🧵

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Igor Grossmann, PhD @igi.bsky.social · 12/06/2026

If you're in Freiburg or nearby and want to talk #wisdom, #metacognition, social psychology, #AI, or anything adjacent — I'm around all month. Coffee's on me. ☕

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Igor Grossmann, PhD @igi.bsky.social · 12/06/2026

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).

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Igor Grossmann, PhD @igi.bsky.social · 12/06/2026

Two academic homes for the month: the Dept of Psychology at the University of Freiburg (with Christoph Klauer) and the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security & Law (hosted by Isa Thielmann).

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Igor Grossmann, PhD @igi.bsky.social · 12/06/2026

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 🧵

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Igor Grossmann, PhD @igi.bsky.social · 31/05/2026

The broader point: intractable problems require metacognitive control over object-level strategies. AI alignment may depend not just on optimizing outputs, but on building systems that can reflect on their own limits, alternatives, and uncertainty. #AIalignment #metacognition

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Igor Grossmann, PhD @igi.bsky.social · 31/05/2026

It connects with the core thesis of our recent @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social paper on “machine wisdom”. Our paper focuses more on the why: why AI systems need perspectival metacognition to become more robust, explainable, and safe. doi.org/10.1016/j.ti...

doi.org

Redirecting

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Igor Grossmann, PhD @igi.bsky.social · 31/05/2026

Can LLMs know what they don’t know? A paper by Steyvers & Peters offers a sharp empirical look at AI metacognition: how models track their own knowledge boundaries & communicate uncertainty, in the spirit of metacognitive sensitivity metrics. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

journals.sagepub.com

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

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Igor Grossmann, PhD @igi.bsky.social · 26/05/2026

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

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Igor Grossmann, PhD @igi.bsky.social · 23/05/2026

3/ Bonus highlight: visits from several @UWaterloo psychology students. 🎓

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Igor Grossmann, PhD @igi.bsky.social · 23/05/2026

2/ Grateful for visits with colleagues in Genoa, Milan & Lucca, connecting with the Italian Young Academy, and esp. GabyUmbach's hospitality and our exchanges on strengthening the evidential value of science in policy foresight, & the role of social scientists in the AI age.

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Igor Grossmann, PhD @igi.bsky.social · 23/05/2026

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.

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Igor Grossmann, PhD @igi.bsky.social · 17/05/2026

I think more of the answers to these questions are in the paper :). link.springer.com/article/10.3...

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Igor Grossmann, PhD @igi.bsky.social · 12/05/2026

"If there is anything that still ails psychology... it is the neglect of investigation of environmental or ecological texture." Brunswik, '57 @bayesandbounds.bsky.social takes that seriously in the new Psychological Inquiry 37:1. Check in out! 🔗 doi.org/10.1080/1047840X.2026.2650209

doi.org

In the Mind or in the World? Types of Beliefs and the Locality of Evidence

People’s beliefs appear to be divisible into two distinct types. Some beliefs refer directly to the observable world, readily guide behavior, and are easily revised when challenged. Others, includi...

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Igor Grossmann, PhD @igi.bsky.social · 05/05/2026

Thank you! It was surprisingly hard to publish. I guess, slow culturally- and psychometrically-minded research is still not valued as much as flashy experimental paradigms...

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Igor Grossmann, PhD @igi.bsky.social · 05/05/2026

8/ Enormous credit to @maksimrudnev.com who led the analyses and brought this over the finish line, and to @nachristakis.bsky.social whose Honduras fieldwork made non-WEIRD validation possible. Also @analurodlr.bsky.social and Ryan Barrett. rdcu.be/fg3EB

rdcu.be

Measuring intellectual humility through situated behavior: An alternative to dispositional self-reports

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Igor Grossmann, PhD @igi.bsky.social · 05/05/2026

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

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Igor Grossmann, PhD @igi.bsky.social · 05/05/2026

6/ In Honduras, women initially looked lower in IH than men. Then we checked who they argued with. Women more often recalled disagreements with subordinates (e.g., children), where IH was lower for everyone. Status of opponent fully accounted for the the gender effect.

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Igor Grossmann, PhD @igi.bsky.social · 05/05/2026

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.

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Igor Grossmann, PhD @igi.bsky.social · 05/05/2026

4/ We tested it on: 🇺🇸 633 English- and Spanish-speaking North Americans (online) and 🇭🇳 2,567 adults from 136 rural Honduran villages (face-to-face) The results: Same factor structure. Scalar invariance across cultures and situations! No high literacy or numeracy required.

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Igor Grossmann, PhD @igi.bsky.social · 05/05/2026

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).

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Igor Grossmann, PhD @igi.bsky.social · 05/05/2026

2/ The problem with trait scales: rating "I'm willing to revise my views" demands you recall every relevant past disagreement, evaluate your humility in each, and aggregate it into one number. That mental calculus exceeds reasonable memory use. So we shortcut to heuristics. So we self-enhance...

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Igor Grossmann, PhD @igi.bsky.social · 05/05/2026

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. 🧵

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Igor Grossmann, PhD @igi.bsky.social · 05/05/2026

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...

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Igor Grossmann, PhD @igi.bsky.social · 01/05/2026

Thank you! Yes, it is truly humbling to see how one's line of work can become the focus of a whole book <3.

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Igor Grossmann, PhD @igi.bsky.social · 30/04/2026

5/ 1-yr appointment, renewable. Salary above SSHRC + benefits. Apply by May 31 with cover letter, CV, 2–3 pg research statement, up to 3 pubs, 3 referees → berke.aydas@uwaterloo.ca Inquiries: igrossma@uwaterloo.ca · please share🙏

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Igor Grossmann, PhD @igi.bsky.social · 30/04/2026

4/ 🇨🇦 Global candidates: this is a strong fit for the new Canada Impact+ (CIRTA) award — $70K × 2 yrs, tri-agency funded, designed to recruit international talent. We will actively support competitive candidates for nomination.

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Igor Grossmann, PhD @igi.bsky.social · 30/04/2026

3/ Methods: multilingual LLM topic modelling + cross-cultural human-in-the-loop validation. Looking for someone with PhD in soc psych / decision sci / behavioral econ + serious computational text analysis chops + R/Python.

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Igor Grossmann, PhD @igi.bsky.social · 30/04/2026

2/ The project pairs harmonized economic & coordination games with structured narrative probes across a global consortium (5 continents), culminating in a ManyLabs-style intervention test. Builds on our ongoing Wise Judgment Consortium infrastructure wiseminds.uwaterloo.ca.

wiseminds.uwaterloo.ca

wiseminds

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