We study how people make wise decisions: in everyday life, across cultures, and over time. Our work sits at the intersection of Social & Cultural Psychology and Judgment & Decision Making, with computational methods and projects on human-AI interactions and AI value alignment.
We combine survey, behavioral, and computational approaches (modeling, NLP, and large-scale analyses), and we preregister studies, share analysis code, and document everything so others can replicate and extend our work.
Wise Judgment Consortium is a global, preregistered collaboration led by our lab to map the building blocks of wise judgment across cultures.
- 15 labs · 5 continents · ~3,500+ participants so far.
- Latest update: Preregistration and Study 1 data collection (“Life’s most difficult decisions”) complete; analyses and design of data collection underway.
- Next: data lock 2025-Q4, then analysis and write-up.
News
Postdoctoral Position for Fall 2026 / Winter 2027
The Wisdom and Culture Lab at the University of Waterloo, directed by Igor Grossmann, is seeking applications for a Post-Doctoral Research Associate to join a new international project on cultural narratives and decision-making, starting in Fall 2026 / Winter 2027. The postdoc is structured as a one-year appointment with opportunity for renewal at the one-year mark assuming excellent performance.
New Publication Featuring WaC Research!
Check out this new article in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Imagining and Building Wise Machines: the Centrality of AI Metacognition, which features research from the WaC Lab! This article explores how AI decision-making can be further improved upon to be more effective in thinking outside a pure analytical standpoint, using the basis of human wisdom to fill in the gaps.
Call for Research Proposals – Wise Judgment Consortium
The Wise Judgment Consortium (WJC) invites researchers in psychology and other cognitive and decision sciences to pitch their favourite research idea for upcoming Pathways to Wisdom project.