Igor Grossmann

University of Waterloo | UWaterloo · Department of Psychology

Accurate assessment of societal change relies on robust metrics, yet the reliability of commonly used indicators is uncertain. We conducted an expert-elicitation-guided (n = 24) comprehensive audit of 99 indicators—including 37 pre-selected and 62 expert-nominated markers—across key domains such as climate, economy, public health, and peace/war. Ea...

Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have produced systems capable of increasingly sophisticated performance on cognitive tasks. However, AI systems still struggle in critical ways: unpredictable and novel environments (robustness), lack of transparency in their reasoning (explainability), challenges in communication and commitment (coop...

We reflect on the concept of wisdom from a social psychological lens, with particular focus on the discrepancy between dynamic theories of wisdom and the largely atemporal nature of existing empirical evidence. Upon reviewing theoretical models of the key components of wisdom such as intellectual humility, open-mindedness, and empathy/perspective-t...

Wisdom is the hallmark of social judgment, but how people across cultures recognize wisdom remains unclear—distinct philosophical traditions suggest different views of wisdom’s cardinal features. We explore perception of wise minds across 16 socio-economically and culturally diverse convenience samples from 12 countries. Participants assessed wisdo...

We introduce the concept of “metajudgment” to provide a framework for understanding folk standards people use to navigate everyday decisions. Defined as a set of metatheories and beliefs about different types of judgment, metajudgment serves as the guiding principle behind the selection and application of reasoning strategies in various contexts. W...

This study tests three common assumptions in research on complex thought and wisdom: common cause of indicators, cross-situational consistency, and between-within isomorphism. Using a year-long, multi-wave study of 499 North Americans’ event-contingent reflections on autobiographical adversity, we examined intellectual humility, open-mindedness, pe...

We explored how individuals’ mental representations of complex and uncertain situations impact their ability to reason wisely. To this end, we introduce situated methods to capture abstract and concrete mental representations and the switching between them when reflecting on social challenges. Using these methods, we evaluated the alignment of abst...

We investigated large language models' (LLMs) efficacy in classifying complex psychological constructs like intellectual humility, perspective-taking, open-mindedness, and search for a compromise in narratives of 347 Canadian and American adults reflecting on a workplace conflict. Using state-of-the-art models like GPT-4 across few-shot and zero-sh...

We introduce the concept of ‘meta-judgment’ to provide a framework for understanding folk standards people use to navigate everyday decisions. Defined as a set of meta-theories and beliefs about different types of judgment, meta-judgment serves as the guiding principle behind the selection and application of reasoning strategies in various contexts...

We investigated the universality versus cultural specificity of preferences for internal decision-making strategies (intuition or deliberation) over external strategies (advice from friends or crowds). Participants from diverse samples spanning five continents (N=3,517), including Indigenous communities, were presented with scenarios involving choo...

By exploring the nuances of responsive phenomenology, Streib extends the science of wisdom beyond person-centric phenomena to include the social, interpersonal, and intersubjective dimensions. We applaud Streib’s efforts to enrich wisdom models and highlight several areas requiring further clarity, particularly regarding the causal relationship bet...

Cognitive scientists suggest that inviting people to explain contentious political issues might reduce intergroup toxicity because it exposes people to how poorly they understand the issue. However, whether providing explanations can result in more open-minded political thinking remains unclear. On one hand, inviting people to explain a political i...

By exploring the nuances of responsive phenomenology, Streib extends the science of wisdom beyond person-centric phenomena to include the social, interpersonal, and intersubjective dimensions. We applaud Streib's efforts to enrich wisdom models, and highlight several areas requiring further clarity, particularly regarding the causal relationship be...

In many contemporary societies, misinformation, epistemic arrogance, and intergroup conflict pose serious threats to social cohesion and well-being. Wisdom may offer a potential antidote to these problems, with a recently identified Common Wisdom Model (CWM) suggesting that wisdom involves epistemic virtues such as intellectual humility, openness t...

We examine the opportunities and challenges of expert judgment in social sciences, scrutinizing the way social scientists make predictions. While social scientists show above chance accuracy in predicting lab-based phenomena, they often struggle to predict real-world societal changes. We argue that most causal models used in social sciences are ove...

People often face conflicts where they must choose between their long-term goals and tempting alternatives. Using an open-ended daily diary design, we investigated the characteristics of self-control conflicts in daily life, both replicating and extending past work. Specifically, we examined the factors that affected self-control conflict success,...

Advancing the so-far limited cultural scope of Intellectual Humility (IH) research, we introduce a novel event-contingent recall inventory for its assessment in response to specific disagreements across diverse samples: English and Spanish-speaking North Americans (N=633), and residents of 136 rural Honduran villages (N=2,567). Participants first r...

We investigated Large Language Models' (LLMs) efficacy in classifying complex psychological constructs like intellectual humility, perspective-taking, open-mindedness, and search for a compromise in narratives of 347 Canadian and American adults reflecting on a workplace conflict. Using state-of-the-art models like GPT-4 across few-shot and zero-sh...

Intellectual humility (IH) is often conceived as the recognition of, and appropriate response to, your own intellectual limitations. As far as we are aware, only a handful of studies look at interventions to increase IH - e.g. through journalling - and no study so far explores the extent to which having high or low IH can be predicted. This paper u...

Careful bias management and data fidelity are key.

Age and gender differences in narcissism have been studied often. However, considering the rich history of narcissism research accompanied by its diverging conceptualizations, little is known about age and gender differences across various narcissism measures. The present study investigated age and gender differences and their interactions across e...

Human lives are radically uncertain. Making sense of such uncertainties is the hallmark of wisdom. Sense-making requires narratives, putting them in the center stage of human everyday decision-making. Yet what if radical uncertainty is a narrative itself? Moreover, do laypeople always consider such narratives irrational? Here we pose these question...

At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, psychological scientists frequently made on-the-record predictions in public media about how individuals and society would change. Such predictions were often made outside these scientists’ areas of expertise, with justifications based on intuition, heuristics, and analogical reasoning (Study 1; N = 719 statem...

The concept of wisdom has captivated scholars throughout history, yet disagreements remain over its cultural variability. Here, we investigated wisdom perception in self and others across 16 samples from eight cultural regions on five continents. Participants assessed wisdom exemplars, non-exemplar targets, and themselves on 19 socio-cognitive char...

How well can social scientists predict societal change, and what processes underlie their predictions? To answer these questions, we ran two forecasting tournaments testing the accuracy of predictions of societal change in domains commonly studied in the social sciences: ideological preferences, political polarization, life satisfaction, sentiment...

How well can social scientists predict societal change, and what processes underlie their predictions? To answer these questions, we ran two forecasting tournaments testing the accuracy of predictions of societal change in domains commonly studied in the social sciences: ideological preferences, political polarization, life satisfaction, sentiment...

Age and gender differences in narcissism have been studied often. However, considering the rich history of narcissism research accompanied by its diverging conceptualizations, little is known about age and gender differences across various narcissism measures. The present study investigated age and gender differences and their interactions across e...

Three pre-registered studies explored mental representations of abstractness and concreteness and their association with psychological characteristics of wisdom: intellectual humility, recognition of multiple ways an issue might unfold and change, consideration of different perspectives, and search for compromise/integration of different opinions....

The COVID-19 pandemic caused drastic social changes for many people, including separation from friends and coworkers, enforced close contact with family, and reductions in mobility. Here we assess the extent to which people's evolutionarily-relevant basic motivations and goals—fundamental social motives such as Affiliation and Kin Care—might have b...

Heighted epistemic arrogance, misinformation, and intergroup conflict in many contemporary societies have been paralleled by growing interest in wisdom across social, behavioral and medical sciences. In a recently established Common Wisdom Model, central features concern epistemic virtues of intellectual humility, recognition of world in flux and c...

Human lives are radically uncertain. Making sense of such uncertainties is the hallmark of wisdom. Sense-making requires narratives, putting them in the centerstage of human everyday decision-making. Yet, what if radical uncertainty is a narrative itself? Moreover, do laypeople always consider such narratives irrational? Here, we pose these questio...

How well can social scientists predict societal change, and what processes underlie their predictions? To answer these questions, we ran two forecasting tournaments testing accuracy of predictions of societal change in domains commonly studied in the social sciences: ideological preferences, political polarization, life satisfaction, sentiment on s...

How does psychology vary across human societies? The fundamental social motives framework adopts an evolutionary approach to capture the broad range of human social goals within a taxonomy of ancestrally recurring threats and opportunities. These motives—self-protection, disease avoidance, affiliation, status, mate acquisition, mate retention, and...

The Psychology of Wisdom: An Introduction is the first comprehensive coursebook on wisdom, providing an engaging, balanced, and expert introduction to the psychology of wisdom. It provides a comprehensive and up-to-date account of the psychological science of wisdom, covering wide-ranging perspectives. Each chapter includes extensive pedagogy, incl...

In a time of societal acrimony, psychological scientists have turned to a possible antidote — intellectual humility. Interest in intellectual humility comes from diverse research areas, including researchers studying leadership and organizational behaviour, personality science, positive psychology, judgement and decision-making, education, culture,...

Semantic priming has been studied for nearly 50 years across various experimental manipulations and theoretical frameworks. These studies provide insight into the cognitive underpinnings of semantic representations in both healthy and clinical populations; however, they have suffered from several issues including generally low sample sizes and a la...

Judgments differ from decisions. Judgments are more abstract, decontextualized, and bear fewer consequences for the agent. In pursuit of experimental control, psychological experiments on bias create a simplified, bare-bone representation of social behavior. These experiments resemble conditions in which people judge others, but not how they make r...

New analyses related to Varnum, M. E. W., Krems, J. A., Morris, C., Wormley, A., & Grossmann, I. (2021). Why are song lyrics becoming simpler? a time series analysis of lyrical complexity in six decades of American popular music. PLOS ONE, 16(1), e0244576.

Human societies are not static. Attitudes, norms, institutions, behavior, and cultural products shift over time, sometimes with dizzying speed. However psychological science has either largely ignored cultural change or tacitly treated it as a source of noise. These changes in fact have important implications not only for psychological theory and r...

This book was inadvertently published with incorrect affiliation of Dr. Manlio De Domenico. The affiliation has now been corrected in the chapter.

How do experts in human behavior think the world might change after the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic? What advice do they have for the postpandemic world? Is there a consensus on the most significant psychological and societal changes ahead? To answer these questions, we analyzed interviews from the World After COVID Project—reflections of more...

Across six studies (N = 1988 US residents and 81 traditional people of Papua), participants judged agents acting in sacrificial moral dilemmas. Utilitarian agents, described as opting to sacrifice a single individual for the greater good, were perceived as less predictable and less moral than deontological agents whose inaction resulted in five peo...

We explore folk theories of sound judgment across two cultures, with a particular focus on the distinction between rationality and reasonableness and how people apply these concepts in a range of social and non-social contexts. Four studies using English-speaking samples in North America (Studies 1-3; N=1,826) and a Mandarin-speaking sample in Chin...

How do people reason in response to ambiguous messages shared by admirable individuals? Using behavioral markers and self-report questionnaires, in two experiments (N = 571) we examined the influence of speakers’ admirability on meaning-seeking and wise reasoning in response to pseudo-profound bullshit. In both studies, statements that sounded supe...

Fertility rates have been declining worldwide over the past fifty years, part of a phenomenon known as “the demographic transition.” Prior work suggests that this decline is related to population density. In the present study, we draw on life history theory to examine the relationship between population density and fertility across 174 countries ov...

Psychological theories cast mindfulness as a form of awareness in which accepting the presence of stressful thoughts and feelings facilitates engaged exploration and identification of adaptive responses. Critics of mindfulness’ popularization suggest that lay people misconstrue acceptance as a passive endorsement of experience, undermining engaged...

Human societies are not static. Attitudes, norms, institutions, behavior, and cultural products shift over time, sometimes with dizzying speed. However psychological science has either largely ignored cultural change or tacitly treated it as a source of noise. These changes in fact have important implications not only for psychological theory and r...

Focusing on one’s adversity can be a source of strength, facilitating meaning-making and growth. However, adversity can also lead to depression, anxiety, and trauma-related stress. The authors propose that the self-perspective one takes while reflecting on adversity—that is, self-distanced (third-person perspective on one’s experiences) versus self...

Across six studies (N = 1,988 US residents and 81 traditional people of Papua), participants judged agents acting in sacrificial moral dilemmas. Utilitarian agents, described as opting to sacrifice a single individual for the greater good, were perceived as less predictable and less moral than deontological agents whose inaction resulted in five pe...

Human societies are not static. Attitudes, norms, institutions, behavior, and cultural products shift over time, sometimes with dizzying speed. However psychological science has either largely ignored cultural change or tacitly treated it as a source of noise. These changes in fact have important implications not only for psychological theory and r...

Some people think wisdom is a stable and invariable individual disposition. Others view wisdom as deeply embedded in culture, experiences, and situations, and treat these features as mutually making up wisdom. Who is right and what are the implications for measurement, training and the fundamental (essentialist vs. constructivist) nature of wisdom...

Research on consequences of adversity appears inconclusive. Adversity can be detriment to mental health, promoting maladaptive patterns of thoughts. At the same time, posttraumatic growth studies suggest that overcoming major adversity facilitates growth in wisdom-related patterns of thoughts. We address this puzzle by examining how distinct types...

Pandemics are enormous threats to the world that impact all aspects of our lives, especially the global economy. The COVID-19 pandemic has emerged since December 2019 and has affected the global economy in many ways. As the world becomes more interconnected, the economic impacts of the pandemic become more serious. In addition to increased health e...

Judgments differ from decisions. Judgments are more abstract, decontextualized and bear fewer consequences for the agent. In pursuit of experimental control, psychological experiments on bias create a simplified, bare-bone representation of social behavior. These experiments resemble conditions in which people judge others, but not how they make re...

Fertility rates have been declining worldwide over the past fifty years, part of a phenomenon known as “the demographic transition.” Prior work suggests that this decline is related to population density. In the present study, we draw on life history theory to examine the relationship between population density and fertility across 174 countries ov...

Effective management of global crises relies on expert judgment of their societal effects. How accurate are such judgments? In the spring of 2020, we asked social scientists (N = 717) and lay Americans (N = 394) to make predictions about COVID-19 pandemic-related societal change across social and psychological domains. Six months later we obtained...

How can people wisely navigate social conflict? Two preregistered longitudinal experiments (Study 1: Canadian adults; Study 2: American and Canadian adults; total N = 555) tested whether encouraging distanced (i.e., third-person) self-reflection would help promote wisdom. Both experiments measured wise reasoning (i.e., intellectual humility, open-m...

Wisdom has been a central theme in the philosophical inquiry of the human experience for centuries, with the earliest written teachings dating back to the ancient Egyptian vizier, Ptahhotep 25-24 century BCE. The virtue of wisdom has been attributed to the great deities of various cultures and mythologies (e.g., Anahit of Armenia, Athena of Greece)...

How will the world change as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic? What can people do to best adapt to the societal changes ahead? To answer these questions, over the course of the summer-fall 2020 we launched the World After COVID Project, interviewing more than 50 of the world’s leading scholars in the behavioral and social sciences, including fello...

Song lyrics are rich in meaning. In recent years, the lyrical content of popular songs has been used as an index of culture’s shifting norms, affect, and values. One particular, newly uncovered, trend is that lyrics of popular songs have become increasingly simple over time. Why might this be? Here, we test the idea that increasing lyrical simplici...

Previous theory and research on bounded rationality has emphasized how limited cognitive resources constrain people from making utility maximizing choices. This paper expands the concept of bounded rationality to consider how people’s rationality may be constrained by their internalization of a qualitatively distinct standard for sound judgment, wh...

We investigate the relationship between ethnic diversity and the rise of individualism in the United States during the 20th and 21st centuries. Tests of the historical rates of ethnic diversity alongside individualistic relational structures (e.g., adults living alone, single-/multi-child families) from the years 1950 to 2018 reveal that societal a...

Previous theory and research on bounded rationality has emphasized how limited cognitive resources constrain people from making utility maximizing choices. This paper expands the concept of bounded rationality to consider how people’s rationality may be constrained by their internalization of a qualitatively distinct standard for sound judgment, wh...

Song lyrics are rich in meaning. In recent years, the lyrical content of popular songs has been used as an index of culture’s shifting norms, affect, and values. One particular, newly uncovered, trend is that lyrics of popular songs have become increasingly simple over time. Why might this be? Here, we test the idea that increasing lyrical simplici...

We investigate the relationship between ethnic diversity and the rise of individualism in the United States during the 20th-21st centuries. Tests of the historical rates of ethnic diversity alongside individualistic relational structures (e.g., adults living alone, single/multi-child families) from the years 1950-2018 reveal that societal and regio...

Research on consequences of adversity suggests a puzzle. On the one hand, posttraumatic growth studies suggest that working through major adversity facilitates growth in wisdom. On the other hand, working through adversity can exacerbate negative emotions and thoughts. We address this puzzle by examining how distinct forms of adversity impact wisdo...

Objective: Posttraumatic growth typically refers to enduring positive psychological change experienced as a result of adversity, trauma, or highly challenging life circumstances. Critics have challenged insights from much of the prior research on this topic, pinpointing its significant methodological limitations. In response to these critiques, we...

Posttraumatic growth typically refers to enduring positive psychological change experienced as a result of adversity, trauma, or highly challenging life circumstances. Critics have challenged insights from much of the prior research on this topic, pinpointing its significant methodological limitations. In response to these critiques, we propose tha...

Two prospective studies examine how wise reasoning about an anticipated conflict interaction—intellectual humility, recognition of uncertainty and change, consideration and integration of different perspectives—is associated with interpersonal feelings and closeness to the interaction partner after the challenging interaction. In Study 1 ( N = 243)...

How do intraindividual changes in wisdom-related characteristics of cognitive broadening—open-minded reflection on challenging situations, consideration of change, and epistemic humility—relate to subjective well-being over time? To test this relationship, we performed cross-lagged panel analyses from three waves of the national U.S. sample taken a...