Thomas L. Griffiths

Biography

Griffiths was born in London but moved with his family when he was eight to Perth, Australia.

Growing up, Griffiths enjoyed computer programming and online role-playing games. At twelve, he started fencing, which he says involves "interesting computational problems",

Griffiths received his undergraduate degree in psychology from the University of Western Australia. He became a full professor at Berkeley in 2015.

In 2018, Griffiths was hired by Princeton, as a joint appointment by the Department of Computer Science and the Department of Psychology. At Princeton, he is the Henry R. Luce Professor of Information Technology, Consciousness, and Culture.

Awards In 2011 the Association for Psychological Science awarded Griffiths its Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Contributions, recognizing his work exploring "mathematical models of human cognition".

In 2012 he won American Psychological Association's Award for Distinguished Scientific Early Career Contributions to Psychology "for bringing mathematical precision to the deepest questions in human learning, reasoning, and concept formation."

In 2014, Griffiths received a Cognitive Science Society Award. At that time, he was "director of the Computational Cognitive Science Lab and the Institute of Cognitive and Brain Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley." In 2019, the National Academy of Sciences awarded Griffiths its $75,000 Troland Research Award "for his research into how people and machines make decisions."

In 2017, while at Berkeley, Griffiths was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship, an award given "on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise." Berkeley described his work at that time as follows: "His research explores connections between human and machine learning, using ideas from statistics and artificial intelligence to understand how people solve the challenging computational problems they encounter in everyday life." David DiSalvo, author of What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite, called Algorithms to Live By a "surprisingly useful book that travels from computer science to human decision-making... a dense primer on the algorithms of decision-making and a tip-filled guide for making better decisions."

In The Guardian, Oliver Burkeman wrote that he "wasn't predisposed to love Algorithms To Live By" but by the end of the book was convinced that "computing algorithms could be a surprisingly useful way to embrace the messy compromises of real, non-Vulcan life." MIT Technology Review listed it as one of their "Best Books of 2016."

Griffiths released The Laws of Thought: The Quest for a Mathematical Theory of the Mind in 2026. Siobhan Roberts describes it as "a rigorous and captivating account of how cognition can be modeled via three mathematical frameworks: logic, artificial neural networks (“mathematical systems that emulate the operation of the brain”) and probability theory."

Personal life Griffiths is married to fellow Princeton psychology professor Tania Lombrozo. and has two daughters.