Igor Grossmann

• Ph.D., University of Michigan
• Curriculum Vitae
• View my profile on Google scholar, or ResearchGate
• Personal Website
• Wisdom and Culture lab website
• On Wisdom Podcast

Research in my lab explores people and cultures, sometimes together, and often across time. Most of our work either focuses on how people make sense of the world around them—their expectations, lay theories, meta-cognitions, forecasts—or it concerns how larger cultural forces impact human behaviour and societal change. Currently, we are working on the topics of wise reasoning, intellectual humility, empathy, mindfulness, normative standards of judgment, as well as the power of forecasting societal change by advocates of clashing view on the future.

Our work incorporates perspectives from anthropology, behavioural ecology, economics, philosophy, as well as psychology, and we collaborate with scholars in these disciplines from around the world. We also use a range of methods, including field studies, laboratory and online behavioral experiments, narrative diaries, psychophysiology, and big data analytics (machine learning, natural language processing). We especially emphasize the use of mixed methods combining diverse levels of analysis and bridging qualitative and quantitative techniques for understanding how humans make sense of their world and societal change.

Representative publications

• Choi, E., Farb, N. A., Pogrebtsova, E., Gruman, J., & Grossmann, I. (2021). What do people mean when they talk about mindfulness? Clinical Psychology Review, 89. View PDF

• Grossmann, I., Dorfman, A., Oakes, H., Santos, H. C., Vohs, K. D., & Scholer, A. A. (2021). Training for wisdom: The distanced self-reflection diary method. Psychological Science, 32, 381–394. View PDF

• Grossmann, I., Eibach, R. P., Koyama, J., & Sahi, Q. (2020). Folk standards of sound judgment: Rationality versus reasonableness. Science Advances, 6, eaaz0289. View PDF

• Grossmann, I., Weststrate, N. M., Ardelt, M., Brienza, J. P., Dong, M., Ferrari, M., Fournier, M. A., Hu, C. S., Nusbaum, H. C. & Vervaeke, J. (2020). The science of wisdom in a polarized world: Knowns and unknowns. Psychological Inquiry, 31, 103-133. View PDF

• Varnum, M. E. W. & Grossmann, I. (2017). Cultural change: The how and the why. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 12, 956–972. View PDF