Mariano Sigman
Capable leadership teams routinely produce decisions worse than the people in the room are individually capable of. Large meetings amplify the loudest voice. Lone experts carry their own predictable distortions. The gap between what a senior group could decide and what it actually decides is not a culture problem; it is a question of how the conversation is structured, and that responds to design.
Mariano Sigman is a cognitive neuroscientist and bestselling author whose experimental research on decision-making and collective intelligence gives boards and leadership teams a science-based account of why groups misjudge and what changes the answer.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Mariano Sigman
- A 2018 Nature Human Behaviour study he co-authored, run with 5,180 live participants, showed that aggregating small structured debates produces sharper answers than the wisdom of thousands; that finding rewrites how senior groups should be designed to decide.
- He directs the Decision-Making programme of the Human Brain Project, Europe’s flagship neuroscience consortium, and is the only Latin American scientist to hold a directorship in that initiative.
- His training in physics in Buenos Aires, neuroscience at Rockefeller, and postdoctoral work with Stanislas Dehaene at the College de France gives his claims a methodological grounding that separates them from motivational uses of the same science.
- “The Secret Life of the Mind”, published by HarperCollins, has been translated into more than a dozen languages and reviewed by Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, and Science Magazine; his ideas hold up outside the speaker circuit.
- His 2023 book “Artificial”, co-authored with Santiago Bilinkis, gives leadership audiences a calm, scientifically grounded read on what AI changes and does not change in human cognition.
Biography highlights
- PhD in neuroscience from Rockefeller University; postdoctoral research with Stanislas Dehaene at the College de France.
- Director of the Decision-Making programme of the Human Brain Project; the only Latin American scientist to hold a directorship in that initiative.
- Associate Professor at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella; founder of the Integrative Neuroscience Laboratory at the University of Buenos Aires; Principal Researcher at CONICET.
- Pius XI Medal from the Pontifical Academy of Sciences (2016); James S. McDonnell Scholar Award; Human Frontier Science Program Career Development Award.
- Author of “The Secret Life of the Mind” (HarperCollins, 2017) and “El poder de las palabras” (2022); co-author of “Artificial” with Santiago Bilinkis (2023).
- TED main-stage speaker on collective intelligence with Dan Ariely.
Biography
Smart people in a room together do not reliably make smart decisions. Mariano Sigman has spent two decades building the experimental science that explains why, and what to change about it. His laboratory at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella draws on physics, neuroscience, linguistics, and cognitive science to study how individuals and groups actually form judgments under uncertainty.
The clearest example is a 2018 paper in Nature Human Behaviour with Joaquin Navajas and colleagues. Working with 5,180 live participants, the team showed that aggregating the consensus of small structured debate groups was substantially more accurate than averaging the opinions of thousands of independent individuals. The architecture of a conversation, in other words, matters more than the number of voices inside it.
Sigman trained as a physicist at the University of Buenos Aires, took a PhD in neuroscience at Rockefeller, and did postdoctoral research at the College de France with Stanislas Dehaene, one of the leading figures in cognitive science. He directs the Decision-Making programme of the Human Brain Project, the European flagship initiative, and is the only Latin American scientist to hold a directorship there. “The Secret Life of the Mind”, published by HarperCollins, became an international bestseller and brought his work on judgment, learning, and consciousness to readers in more than a dozen languages. His 2023 book “Artificial”, co-authored with Santiago Bilinkis, applies the same lens to the relationship between human cognition and AI.
For boards and executive teams, that body of work answers a specific question. Senior decisions live or die on how a small group aggregates uncertain information. Sigman gives leaders a working account of where that process breaks, why it breaks, and which structural moves close the gap.
Key speaking topics
- Collective intelligence and group decision-making
- Cognitive bias and judgment under uncertainty
- The neuroscience of learning and adult neuroplasticity
- Conversation, language, and belief formation
- Artificial intelligence and human cognition
- Consciousness and the science of the mind
- Creativity and the cognitive roots of innovation
Ideal for
- Boards and executive committees rethinking how high-stakes decisions are deliberated and made
- CHROs and learning leaders designing capability and judgment programmes for senior talent
- Strategy, innovation, and transformation leaders working under deep uncertainty
- Technology and AI leadership teams reasoning about human-machine collaboration
Audience outcomes
- A working account of why structured small-group debate outperforms both lone experts and large consensus meetings.
- A specific vocabulary for the cognitive distortions that quietly shape leadership judgment, including confidence bias and equality bias.
- A clearer read on how the adult brain learns and changes, and where common assumptions about learning capacity are wrong.
- A practical sense of how language and conversation shape belief, memory, and choice inside teams.
- A grounded view of what AI changes, and does not change, in the cognitive demands placed on senior leaders.
Talks
A keynote on how individuals and societies form judgments and where cognitive distortion systematically degrades those choices.
Key takeaways:
- The hidden processes that shape everyday and strategic decisions.
- Cognitive distortions that intensify under pressure and time scarcity.
- How decision architecture changes individual and organisational outcomes.
A talk drawn from Sigman’s Nature Human Behaviour research on when groups outperform experts and when they do not.
Key takeaways:
- Why small structured debate groups produce sharper answers than large crowds.
- The conditions under which discussion improves outcomes, and when it makes them worse.
- Design principles for boards and executive teams that want better collective judgment.
An evidence-based examination of the brain’s lifelong capacity to learn and change.
Key takeaways:
- Why adults underestimate their own capacity to learn.
- What neuroplasticity actually says, across the lifespan.
- How organisations can build environments that support real behavioural change.
A keynote built on the thesis of “El poder de las palabras”, on how dialogue reshapes belief and behaviour.
Key takeaways:
- How self-imposed narratives constrain learning, performance, and decision-making.
- The role of language in shaping team belief and culture.
- A practical frame for shifting the internal narratives that hold teams back.
A talk on advances in decoding and influencing the human brain and what they mean for organisations and society.
Key takeaways:
- The current state of brain-decoding technology and where it is heading.
- The implications for privacy, communication, and human identity.
- The ethical questions leadership teams cannot leave to technologists alone.
A constructive examination of what creativity is, how it works in the brain, and how it can be developed.
Key takeaways:
- The cognitive foundations of creative thinking.
- What neuroscience can and cannot say about how creativity is developed.
- A practical perspective on building creative capacity inside teams.