Overview
- Researchers surveyed more than 3,500 participants across a dozen countries, from major urban centers to Amazonian Indigenous communities.
- Participants consistently favored relying on their own intuition or deliberation over seeking input from friends or crowds when facing complex choices.
- The strength of the inward-first preference varied with culture, intensifying in more independent societies and weakening in interdependent ones.
- Grossmann and colleagues recommend designing group processes and public communications that respect private reasoning by giving people time to reflect before presenting advice.
- The paper, produced by nearly 40 collaborators in the Geography of Philosophy Project, was published on August 12, 2025 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.