A founder's note on what the Institute for Human Reasoning is for, what it refuses to be, and what the word "institute" obliges us to do.
I have spent my working life as a researcher, and the last few years teaching research to product managers, designers and marketers — people who don't call themselves researchers but make or propose decisions every week on the strength of some evidence. I liked that work. I still do it. But somewhere along the way I noticed I was teaching the wrong scarce skill.
The rooms I sat in had plenty of evidence. Interviews, dashboards, experiments, and increasingly a well-written AI summary of all three. What those rooms were short of was the thing that happens after the evidence arrives: someone deciding what to believe, how much, and what to do about it. I watched good research lose to a preference that had been stated out loud a week earlier. I watched analyses get commissioned to justify choices already made. I watched teams call themselves data-driven and mean it, sincerely, while the data waited outside the door.
None of that is fixed by teaching more people to run interviews.
Here is the argument in one paragraph. AI is making the collection and analysis of evidence dramatically cheaper. Summaries, clusters, first-pass coding, a draft of the report — the cost is heading toward zero. When something gets that cheap, the value moves to whatever remains scarce. What remains scarce is judgment: framing the question, deciding whether an answer deserves belief, noticing what the analysis cannot see, holding several kinds of evidence with different failure modes together, and owning the consequence.
Capability is not authority. A model that can produce an answer instantly has not earned the right to decide. That right belongs to a person, and the person needs to be better at exercising it than most of us currently are. That is the whole territory of the Institute: human reasoning, for decisions that matter, in a world where the technology will happily do the reasoning for you if you let it.
Don't outsource the thinking that matters. That is not a slogan against AI. It is a division of labour.
A course teaches. An institute has to know something — and has to be able to say how it knows.
I chose the word deliberately, and it comes with obligations I intend to keep. We do original research, not only teach it; our first study, Who actually decides, is reconstructing real business decisions to find out when evidence changes a choice a powerful person already prefers, and what AI actually does in that moment. We publish our methods, our limitations and our priors before the data come in, so you can hold them against us. We say "we don't know yet" when we don't. And we update in public when we're wrong, because an institution that cannot be wrong in public cannot be trusted in private.
The test I apply to everything we make is simple: does this increase a person's agency over a decision, or quietly reduce it? A framework that makes people feel rigorous without making them more right fails the test. So does a tool that replaces judgment while calling itself a helper.
Not a UX research school, though research is where we come from and where much of our teaching starts. Not anti-AI; we use it every day, and the study itself is coded with it. Not a library of prompts with a logo. Not a critical-thinking self-help brand, and not a consultancy dressed up as a research institution. And not a place where every product depends on me. I'm the founder and I'm the first voice, but the claims have to stand without my name attached, or they aren't claims.
Research, first: studies of how evidence, power and technology actually meet in organisations, published openly. Education that starts from a concrete decision rather than from theory — one pain, one reasoning tool, one thing you can use tomorrow. Methods and playbooks that survive contact with a real company. And a community of people who would rather know how they decide than be flattered about it.
The first playbook, on research that leads to real decisions, is already out. The first study is in the field now. If you were part of a decision this year where budget, people or product direction was at stake, it starts with four minutes of your time.
Four minutes. One real decision. Take the diagnostic →
Nina Somkina · Founder, Institute for Human Reasoning
Institute for Human Reasoning is a research and education organisation strengthening human reasoning for consequential decisions in a technology-shaped world.
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