Igor Grossmann, PhD @igi.bsky.social

Presenting at #ECP22 in Edinburgh: Wed 16:45 (Salisbury): Multilingual Topic Modeling for Cross-Cultural Research (for Y. Li due to visa). Thu 11:00 (St Trinnean): Intellectual humility & forecast accuracy. DM to connect. #CulturalPsychology #Forecasting #Intellectualhumility

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

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.

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 Flek, @TomerUllman, @MaartenSap & Jennifer Hu. 🧵

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. ☕

The work: metacognitive foundations of judgment under uncertainty, forecasting, and cultural evolution. The road here ran through Konstanz (@CBehav , hosted by Wolfgang Gaissmaier) and @HSGStGallen (IBT-HSG, hosted by Tobias Ebert).

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/Prize. A short thread on landing here 🧵

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

It connects with the core thesis of our recent @TrendsCognSci 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.tics…

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/10.1177/09…

New paper with the amazing @aejj1228 @amirhkarimi_ : "Metacognition Should Be the Scientific Framework for Bounded and Effective Self-Governance in Generative AI" LINK: arxiv.org/abs/2605.23981 #metacognition #LLM #selfgovernance

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

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

A presto, Firenze. 🇮🇹 Spent May 2026 as a Visiting Fellow at the @EUI_EU Robert Schuman Centre @EUI_Schuman , during EUI's 50th anniversary. Fiesole's hills, Renaissance Florence, and conversations on science for policy. Still processing it all.

Why do we agree about the sky being blue but argue about politics and religion? @BayesandBounds target article in Psych Inquiry 37:1 says: not because there are 2 kinds of belief; because evidence in the world has locality. Plus commentaries + reply. 🔗 doi.org/10.1080/104784…

8/ Enormous credit to @MaksimRudnev who led the analyses and brought this over the finish line, and to @NAChristakis whose Honduras fieldwork made non-WEIRD validation possible. Also @AnaLRodriguezD and Ryan Barrett. rdcu.be/fg3EB #measurement #intellectual #humility

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

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. 🧵