Igor Grossman gave a lecture

Normative theories of judgment either focus on the rational standard – decontextualized preference maximization, or the reasonable standard – the pragmatic balance of preferences and socially-conscious norms.How do people’s intuitions and behavior about these concepts relate to theoretical frameworks advanced in economics, politics, and the law?

We show that people sustain both standards of judgmental competence, evidenced in spontaneous descriptions, and the personality characteristics and behavioral strategies they attribute to rational vs. reasonable agents.

We document this rational/reasonable distinction in written media across multiple languages (English, Russian, Portuguese, Spanish). Further, experiments among North Americans and Pakistani bankers, street merchants, and samples engaging in exchange (vs. market-) economy show that rationality and reasonableness lead people to different conclusions about what constitutes good judgment in dilemmas that pit self-interest against fairness: Rationality is reductionist and instrumental, whereas reasonableness integrates preferences with particulars and moral concerns.



Igor Grossmann is a social-cognitive scientist exploring the interplay of sociocultural factors for wise reasoning and sound judgment. Grossmann studied at the University of Freiburg and at the University of Michigan, where he received his Ph.D. in 2012. He is currently an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Waterloo, Canada.

His work has been published in such outlets as Proceedings of the Royal Academy: B, Perspectives on Psychological Science, Psychological Science, PNAS, Journal of Experimental Psychology, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and Emotion. His contributions have been recognized through numerous awards (e.g., USERN Prize for Social Sciences, SAGE Young Scholar Award from Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Rising Star Award from the Association for Psychological Science, APA Dissertation Award).