Igor Grossmann, PhD

Full paper draft under review in Annual Review. Navigating the Unknown: The Sociocultural and Metacognitive Architecture of Wisdom @SSRN papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

12/12 This synthesis moves us from wisdom as a mystical and rare ideal to a tangible, highly practical construct which couldn't be more relevant in the uncertain world of today.

11/12 Wisdom is a dynamic system. It includes the Intergenerational Database (Culture) accessed by a High-Fidelity Search Engine (Metacognition).

To foster it, we must get a handle on both cultural evolutionary and cogsci angles to the issue.

10/12 Interventions 🛠️Can we boost wisdom? Yes.
Expose minds to diverse cultural narratives (history, literature, philosophy) so they have more models to draw from.
Train Metacognition: Drills that force "perspective shifting" and context-checking before judgment.

9/12 Measurement 📏We need to move beyond self-report surveys ("On a scale of 1-10, how wise are you?").
The future of wisdom research lies in measuring the Process: How diverse is an individual's "proverb toolkit"? How calibrated are they to a novel context under time pressure?

8/12 AI-coddled minds🤖We are offloading our cognitive struggle to algorithms. AI offers frictionless answers.
But wisdom needs friction. It requires the metacognitive effort to sort through conflicting narratives. Outsourcing judgment, we risk atrophying the very mechanism that makes us wise!

7/12 Implications: In a volatile world, raw IQ often fails because it seeks the "correct" answer. Wisdom seeks the "adaptive" answer.
Metacognition allows us to toggle between different cultural tools when the environment shifts, reducing the error rate in high-stakes judgment.

6/12 The Fit Mechanism: True wisdom is the "fit" between the tool and the specific context.

It’s knowing that "Persistence pays off" is the right heuristic for a difficult project, but the wrong heuristic for a toxic relationship (where "Cut your losses" is the wise choice).

5/12 But having tools isn't enough. You need to know when to use them 🧠 .
This is where certain forms of Metacognition enter (Lens 2):
Discrimination: Recognizing the features of the current problem.
Monitoring: Checking if your standard response fits.

4/12Think of cultural narratives as "apps" installed on your hardware. "Haste makes waste" (Speed-accuracy trade-off) / "Look before you leap" (Risk).
Wisdom here is having a diverse library of these narratives, rather than relying on a single, rigid rule for every situation

3/12 Lens 1: Cultural Evolution: we don't invent wisdom from scratch. Proverbs, fables, and heuristics aren't just "old sayings," they are compressed data. They are institutional tools perfected over generations to solve recurring coordination problems and social dilemmas.

2/12 Classic thesis: Wisdom as ability to select the right tool for the right context.
But where do they come from? Cultural evolution (lens 1): Intergenerationally transmitted "survival kits" (narratives, proverbs, maxims). Cognitive Science (lens 2): The metacognitive machinery to pick them up.

1/12Wisdom isn’t just a trait or a mystical aura. It’s a metacognitive & cultural process.

In a new preprint, we propose a new synthesis at the intersection of Cultural Evolution and Cognitive Science, mapping how to judge, think, and survive in an age of uncertainty. 🧵

Feb 26, Graduate College: #AI & #Ethics Conference events.ucalgary.ca/gradcollege/... Excited to visit @ucalgary.bsky.social - for the first time - to discuss #AIethics & #wisdom. Btw, graduate students are invited to submit posters for an interactive poster session as part of the conference.

exciting! @maksimrudnev.com & I would be game!

We've got ISSUES. Literally.

We scraped >100k special issues & over 1 million articles to bring you a PISS-poor paper. We quantify just how many excess papers are published by guest editors abusing special issues to boost their CVs. How bad is it & what can we do?

arxiv.org/abs/2601.07563

A 🧵 1/n

2/ Numerous implications, incl.: moral conviction can make reasoning worse when stakes + value-conflict rise (which is… most real cases!).

Paper: The Moral Blueprint Is Not Necessary for STEM Wisdom (Roeper Review). DOI: 10.1080/02783193.2025.2593013

Preprint here: osf.io/preprints/ps...

1/ “Ethics-first” is a comfort slogan, not a theory of wisdom in STEM #education.
We argue you don’t need a moral “blueprint” before you can reason wisely in STEM contexts.
The bottleneck is often #metacognitive: noticing uncertainty, checking your frame, integrating other perspectives.

Why you’re wise on Tuesday and foolish on Sunday: Practising wisdom in uncertain times Wisdom fluctuates. New longitudinal evidence suggests wise reasoning is a trainable toolkit —not a trait — and repeated distanced self-reflection can strengthen it in daily life.

Why you’re wise on Tuesday and foolish on Sunday: Practising #wisdom in uncertain times - a brief sunday read & a mild rant against "one trick" gurus & substakers. theconversation.com/why-youre-wi... @theconversation.com

A must-read for anyone interested in historiography, cognitive science, or decision-making.

#History #AHR #Forecasting #Retrodiction #AcademicSky

The Wise Mind Balances the Abstract and the Concrete Abstract. 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 ...

Foxes vs. Hedgehogs: Will grand theorists (hedgehogs) or flexible thinkers (foxes) be better at predicting the contents of a 20-year-old classified document, or those who balance the two doi.org/10.1162/opmi... ? The authors propose "Retrodiction Tournaments" to find out. 🦊🦔

The Science: The paper applies our research on forecasting and wisdom. Just as "superforecasters" use intellectual humility to predict the future, historians can use these cognitive strategies to better "retrodict" the past.

The Core Idea: Historians often explain events after the fact. This paper suggests we should predict what embargoed archives will reveal before they open. It turns "missing evidence" into a test of expert judgment.

Predicting the Past: Testing Expert Historical Judgement Absences pervade the historical record. The loss or destruction of material, redaction of documents, silence of participants, data embargoes, and poor reco

academic.oup.com/ahr/article/...

Can we predict the past? 🔮
New open-access paper in American Historical Review proposes 'Retrodiction'—using gaps in the archival record to test historical theories.

Interdisciplinary collab feat. David Gill, Marc Trachtenberg, Phil Tetlock, Cendri Hutcherson, and more 🧵👇

I did not, but it looks super interesting. Thank you for sharing!

Preprint here: osf.io/preprints/ps...

#CulturalPsych #SocPsych #CulturalEvolution #SocialChange #Forecasting #Methods #LLMs

The future of the field? Prediction.
We argue for a predictive science of cultural dynamics—using forecasting tournaments & AI-empowered "retrodiction" analyses.

Psychology isn't just a historical, but also a predictive science. It's time our methods reflected that. ⏳

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).

We review case studies showing: 📈 Individualism tracking economic development. 📉 Fertility declining as population density rises. 🦠 Gender equality shifting with pathogen prevalence.