intellectual humility in critical thinking

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• Paul-Elder Critical Thinking Framework

Critical thinking is that mode of thinking – about any subject, content, or problem — in which the thinker improves the quality of his or her thinking by skillfully taking charge of the structures inherent in thinking and imposing intellectual standards upon them. (Paul and Elder, 2001). The Paul-Elder framework has three components:

• The elements of thought (reasoning)
• The  intellectual standards that should be applied to the elements of reasoning
• The intellectual traits associated with a cultivated critical thinker that result from the consistent and disciplined application of the intellectual standards to the elements of thought

According to Paul and Elder (1997), there are two essential dimensions of thinking that students need to master in order to learn how to upgrade their thinking. They need to be able to identify the "parts" of their thinking, and they need to be able to assess their use of these parts of thinking.

Elements of Thought (reasoning)

The "parts" or elements of thinking are as follows:

• All reasoning has a purpose
• All reasoning is an attempt to figure something out, to settle some question, to solve some problem
• All reasoning is based on assumptions
• All reasoning is done from some point of view
• All reasoning is based on data, information and evidence
• All reasoning is expressed through, and shaped by, concepts and ideas
• All reasoning contains inferences or interpretations by which we draw conclusions and give meaning to data
• All reasoning leads somewhere or has implications and consequences

Universal Intellectual Standards

The intellectual standards that are to these elements are used to determine the quality of reasoning. Good critical thinking requires having a command of these standards. According to Paul and Elder (1997 ,2006), the ultimate goal is for the standards of reasoning to become infused in all thinking so as to become the guide to better and better reasoning. The intellectual standards include:

Intellectual Traits

Consistent application of the standards of thinking to the elements of thinking result in the development of intellectual traits of:

• Intellectual Humility
• Intellectual Courage
• Intellectual Empathy
• Intellectual Autonomy
• Intellectual Integrity
• Intellectual Perseverance
• Confidence in Reason
• Fair-mindedness

Characteristics of a Well-Cultivated Critical Thinker

Habitual utilization of the intellectual traits produce a well-cultivated critical thinker who is able to:

• Raise vital questions and problems, formulating them clearly and precisely
• Gather and assess relevant information, using abstract ideas to interpret it effectively
• Come to well-reasoned conclusions and solutions, testing them against relevant criteria and standards;
• Think open-mindedly within alternative systems of thought, recognizing and assessing, as need be, their assumptions, implications, and practical consequences; and
• Communicate effectively with others in figuring out solutions to complex problems

Paul, R. and Elder, L. (2010). The Miniature Guide to Critical Thinking Concepts and Tools. Dillon Beach: Foundation for Critical Thinking Press.

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Intellectual humility: the importance of knowing you might be wrong

Why it’s so hard to see our own ignorance, and what to do about it.

by Brian Resnick

Illustrations by Javier Zarracina

Julia Rohrer wants to create a radical new culture for social scientists. A personality psychologist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Rohrer is trying to get her peers to publicly, willingly admit it when they are wrong.

To do this, she, along with some colleagues, started up something called the Loss of Confidence Project. It’s designed to be an academic safe space for researchers to declare for all to see that they no longer believe in the accuracy of one of their previous findings. The effort recently yielded a paper that includes six admissions of no confidence. And it’s accepting submissions until January 31 .

“I do think it’s a cultural issue that people are not willing to admit mistakes,” Rohrer says. “Our broader goal is to gently nudge the whole scientific system and psychology toward a different culture,” where it’s okay, normalized, and expected for researchers to admit past mistakes and not get penalized for it.

The project is timely because a large number of scientific findings have been disproven, or become more doubtful, in recent years. One high-profile effort to retest 100 psychological experiments found only 40 percent replicated with more rigorous methods. It’s been a painful period for social scientists, who’ve had to deal with failed replications of classic studies and realize their research practices are often weak.

“Not knowing the scope of your own ignorance is part of the human condition”

It’s been fascinating to watch scientists struggle to make their institutions more humble. And I believe there’s an important and underappreciated virtue embedded in this process.

For the past few months, I’ve been talking to many scholars about intellectual humility, the characteristic that allows for admission of wrongness.

I’ve come to appreciate what a crucial tool it is for learning, especially in an increasingly interconnected and complicated world. As technology makes it easier to lie and spread false information incredibly quickly , we need intellectually humble, curious people.

I’ve also realized how difficult it is to foster intellectual humility. In my reporting on this, I’ve learned there are three main challenges on the path to humility:

• In order for us to acquire more intellectual humility, we all, even the smartest among us, need to better appreciate our cognitive blind spots. Our minds are more imperfect and imprecise than we’d often like to admit. Our ignorance can be invisible.
• Even when we overcome that immense challenge and figure out our errors, we need to remember we won’t necessarily be punished for saying, “I was wrong.” And we need to be braver about saying it. We need a culture that celebrates those words.
• We’ll never achieve perfect intellectual humility. So we need to choose our convictions thoughtfully.

This is all to say: Intellectual humility isn’t easy. But damn, it’s a virtue worth striving for, and failing for, in this new year.

Intellectual humility, explained

Intellectual humility is simply “the recognition that the things you believe in might in fact be wrong,” as Mark Leary , a social and personality psychologist at Duke University, tells me.

But don’t confuse it with overall humility or bashfulness. It’s not about being a pushover; it’s not about lacking confidence, or self-esteem. The intellectually humble don’t cave every time their thoughts are challenged.

Instead, it’s a method of thinking. It’s about entertaining the possibility that you may be wrong and being open to learning from the experience of others. Intellectual humility is about being actively curious about your blind spots. One illustration is in the ideal of the scientific method, where a scientist actively works against her own hypothesis, attempting to rule out any other alternative explanations for a phenomenon before settling on a conclusion. It’s about asking: What am I missing here?

It doesn’t require a high IQ or a particular skill set. It does, however, require making a habit of thinking about your limits, which can be painful. “It’s a process of monitoring your own confidence,” Leary says.

When I open myself up to the vastness of my own ignorance, I can’t help but feel a sudden suffocating feeling

This idea is older than social psychology. Philosophers from the earliest days have grappled with the limits of human knowledge. Michel de Montaigne, the 16th-century French philosopher credited with inventing the essay, wrote that “the plague of man is boasting of his knowledge.”

Social psychologists have learned that humility is associated with other valuable character traits: People who score higher on intellectual humility questionnaires are more open to hearing opposing views . They more readily seek out information that conflicts with their worldview. They pay more attention to evidence and have a stronger self-awareness when they answer a question incorrectly.

When you ask the intellectually arrogant if they’ve heard of bogus historical events like “Hamrick’s Rebellion,” they’ll say, “Sure.” The intellectually humble are less likely to do so. Studies have found that cognitive reflection — i.e., analytic thinking — is correlated with being better able to discern fake news stories from real ones. These studies haven’t looked at intellectual humility per se, but it’s plausible there’s an overlap.

Most important of all, the intellectually humble are more likely to admit it when they are wrong. When we admit we’re wrong, we can grow closer to the truth.

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One reason I’ve been thinking about the virtue of humility recently is because our president, Donald Trump, is one of the least humble people on the planet.

It was Trump who said on the night of his nomination, “I alone can fix it,” with the “it” being our entire political system. It was Trump who once said, “ I have one of the great memories of all time .” More recently, Trump told the Associated Press, “I have a natural instinct for science,” in dodging a question on climate change.

A frustration I feel about Trump and the era of history he represents is that his pride and his success — he is among the most powerful people on earth — seem to be related. He exemplifies how our society rewards confidence and bluster, not truthfulness.

Yet we’ve also seen some very high-profile examples lately of how overconfident leadership can be ruinous for companies. Look at what happened to Theranos, a company that promised to change the way blood samples are drawn. It was all hype, all bluster, and it collapsed. Or consider Enron’s overconfident executives, who were often hailed for their intellectual brilliance — they ran the company into the ground with risky, suspect financial decisions.

The problem with arrogance is that the truth always catches up. Trump may be president and confident in his denials of climate change, but the changes to our environment will still ruin so many things in the future.

Why it’s so hard to see our blind spots: “Our ignorance is invisible to us”

As I’ve been reading the psychological research on intellectual humility and the character traits it correlates with, I can’t help but fume: Why can’t more people be like this?

We need more intellectual humility for two reasons. One is that our culture promotes and rewards overconfidence and arrogance (think Trump and Theranos, or the advice your career counselor gave you when going into job interviews). At the same time, when we are wrong — out of ignorance or error — and realize it, our culture doesn’t make it easy to admit it. Humbling moments too easily can turn into moments of humiliation.

So how can we promote intellectual humility for both of these conditions?

In asking that question of researchers and scholars, I’ve learned to appreciate how hard a challenge it is to foster intellectual humility.

First off, I think it’s helpful to remember how flawed the human brain can be and how prone we all are to intellectual blind spots. When you learn about how the brain actually works, how it actually perceives the world, it’s hard not to be a bit horrified, and a bit humbled.

We often can’t see — or even sense — what we don’t know. It helps to realize that it’s normal and human to be wrong.

It’s rare that a viral meme also provides a surprisingly deep lesson on the imperfect nature of the human mind. But believe it or not, the great “Yanny or Laurel” debate of 2018 fits the bill.

For the very few of you who didn’t catch it — I hope you’re recovering nicely from that coma — here’s what happened.

An audio clip (you can hear it below) says the name “Laurel” in a robotic voice. Or does it? Some people hear the clip and immediately hear “Yanny.” And both sets of people — Team Yanny and Team Laurel — are indeed hearing the same thing.

Hearing, the perception of sound, ought to be a simple thing for our brains to do. That so many people can listen to the same clip and hear such different things should give us humbling pause. Hearing “Yanny” or “Laurel” in any given moment ultimately depends on a whole host of factors: the quality of the speakers you’re using, whether you have hearing loss, your expectations.

Here’s the deep lesson to draw from all of this: Much as we might tell ourselves our experience of the world is the truth, our reality will always be an interpretation. Light enters our eyes, sound waves enter our ears, chemicals waft into our noses, and it’s up to our brains to make a guess about what it all is.

“The first rule of the Dunning-Kruger club is you don’t know you’re a member of the Dunning-Kruger club”

Perceptual tricks like this ( “the dress” is another one) reveal that our perceptions are not the absolute truth, that the physical phenomena of the universe are indifferent to whether our feeble sensory organs can perceive them correctly. We’re just guessing. Yet these phenomena leave us indignant: How could it be that our perception of the world isn’t the only one?

That sense of indignation is called naive realism: the feeling that our perception of the world is the truth. “I think we sometimes confuse effortlessness with accuracy,” Chris Chabris , a psychological researcher who co-authored a book on the challenges of human perception, tells me . When something is so immediate and effortless to us — hearing the sound of “Yanny” — it just feels true . (Similarly, psychologists find when a lie is repeated, it’s more likely to be misremembered as being true , and for a similar reason: When you’re hearing something for the second or third time, your brain becomes faster to respond to it. And that fluency is confused with truth.)

Our interpretations of reality are often arbitrary, but we’re still stubborn about them. Nonetheless, the same observations can lead to wildly different conclusions.

(Here’s that same sentence in GIF form.)

For every sense and every component of human judgment, there are illusions and ambiguities we interpret arbitrarily.

Some are gravely serious. White people often perceive black men to be bigger, taller, and more muscular (and therefore more threatening ) than they really are. That’s racial bias — but it’s also a socially constructed illusion. When we’re taught or learn to fear other people, our brains distort their potential threat. They seem more menacing, and we want to build walls around them. When we learn or are taught that other people are less than human , we’re less likely to look upon them kindly and more likely to be okay when violence is committed against them.

Not only are our interpretations of the world often arbitrary, but we’re often overconfident in them. “Our ignorance is invisible to us,” David Dunning, an expert on human blind spots, says.

You might recognize his name as half of the psychological phenomenon that bears his name: the Dunning-Kruger effect. That’s where people of low ability — let’s say, those who fail to understand logic puzzles — tend to unduly overestimate their abilities. Inexperience masquerades as expertise.

An irony of the Dunning-Kruger effect is that so many people misinterpret it, are overconfident in their understanding of it, and get it wrong.

When people talk or write about the Dunning-Kruger effect, it’s almost always in reference to other people. “The fact is this is a phenomenon that visits all of us sooner or later,” Dunning says. We’re all overconfident in our ignorance from time to time. (Perhaps related: Some 65 percent of Americans believe they’re more intelligent than average, which is wishful thinking.)

Similarly, we’re overconfident in our ability to remember. Human memory is extremely malleable, prone to small changes. When we remember, we don’t wind back our minds to a certain time and relive that exact moment, yet many of us think our memories work like a videotape.

Dunning hopes his work helps people understand that “not knowing the scope of your own ignorance is part of the human condition,” he says. “But the problem with it is we see it in other people, and we don’t see it in ourselves. The first rule of the Dunning-Kruger club is you don’t know you’re a member of the Dunning-Kruger club.”

People are unlikely to judge you harshly for admitting you’re wrong

In 2012, psychologist Will Gervais scored an honor any PhD science student would covet: a co-authored paper in the journal Science , one of the top interdisciplinary scientific journals in the world. Publishing in Science doesn’t just help a researcher rise up in academic circles; it often gets them a lot of media attention too.

One of the experiments in the paper tried to see if getting people to think more rationally would make them less willing to report religious beliefs. They had people look at a picture of Rodin’s The Thinker or another statue. They thought The Thinker would nudge people to think harder, more analytically. In this more rational frame of mind, then, the participants would be less likely to endorse believing in something as faith-based and invisible as religion, and that’s what the study found. It was catnip for science journalists: one small trick to change the way we think.

“How would I know if I was wrong?” is actually a really, really hard question to answer

But it was a tiny, small-sample study, the exact type that is prone to yielding false positives. Several years later, another lab attempted to replicate the findings with a much larger sample size , and failed to find any evidence for the effect.

And while Gervais knew that the original study wasn’t rigorous, he couldn’t help but feel a twinge of discomfort.

“Intellectually, I could say the original data weren’t strong,” he says. “That’s very different from the human, personal reaction to it. Which is like, ‘Oh, shit, there’s going to be a published failure to replicate my most cited finding that’s gotten the most media attention .’ You start worrying about stuff like, ‘Are there going to be career repercussions? Are people going to think less of my other work and stuff I’ve done?’”

Gervais’s story is familiar: Many of us fear we’ll be seen as less competent, less trustworthy, if we admit wrongness. Even when we can see our own errors — which, as outlined above, is not easy to do — we’re hesitant to admit it.

But turns out this assumption is false . As Adam Fetterman , a social psychologist at the University of Texas El Paso, has found in a few studies , wrongness admission isn’t usually judged harshly. “When we do see someone admit that they are wrong, the wrongness admitter is seen as more communal, more friendly,” he says. It’s almost never the case, in his studies, “that when you admit you’re wrong, people think you are less competent.”

Sure, there might be some people who will troll you for your mistakes. There might be a mob on Twitter that converges in order to shame you . Some moments of humility could be humiliating. But this fear must be vanquished if we are to become less intellectually arrogant and more intellectually humble.

Humility can’t just come from within — we need environments where it can thrive

But even if you’re motivated to be more intellectually humble, our culture doesn’t always reward it.

The field of psychology, overall, has been reckoning with a “ replication crisis ” where many classic findings in the science don’t hold up under rigorous scrutiny. Incredibly influential textbook findings in psychology — like the “ ego depletion” theory of willpower or the “ marshmallow test ” — have been bending or breaking.

I’ve found it fascinating to watch the field of psychology deal with this. For some researchers, the reckoning has been personally unsettling. “I’m in a dark place,” Michael Inzlicht, a University of Toronto psychologist, wrote in a 2016 blog post after seeing the theory of ego depletion crumble before his eyes. “Have I been chasing puffs of smoke for all these years?”

“It’s bad to think of problems like this like a Rubik’s cube: a puzzle that has a neat and satisfying solution that you can put on your desk”

What I’ve learned from reporting on the “replication crisis” is that intellectual humility requires support from peers and institutions. And that environment is hard to build.

“What we teach undergrads is that scientists want to prove themselves wrong,” says Simine Vazire , a psychologist and journal editor who often writes and speaks about replication issues. “But, ‘How would I know if I was wrong?’ is actually a really, really hard question to answer. It involves things like having critics yell at you and telling you that you did things wrong and reanalyze your data.”

And that’s not fun. Again: Even among scientists — people who ought to question everything — intellectual humility is hard. In some cases, researchers have refused to concede their original conclusions despite the unveiling of new evidence . (One famous psychologist under fire recently told me angrily , “I will stand by that conclusion for the rest of my life, no matter what anyone says.”)

Psychologists are human. When they reach a conclusion, it becomes hard to see things another way. Plus, the incentives for a successful career in science push researchers to publish as many positive findings as possible.

There are two solutions — among many — to make psychological science more humble, and I think we can learn from them.

One is that humility needs to be built into the standard practices of the science. And that happens through transparency. It’s becoming more commonplace for scientists to preregister — i.e., commit to — a study design before even embarking on an experiment. That way, it’s harder for them to deviate from the plan and cherry-pick results. It also makes sure all data is open and accessible to anyone who wants to conduct a reanalysis.

That “sort of builds humility into the structure of the scientific enterprise,” Chabris says. “We’re not all-knowing and all-seeing and perfect at our jobs, so we put [the data] out there for other people to check out, to improve upon it, come up with new ideas from and so on.” To be more intellectually humble, we need to be more transparent about our knowledge. We need to show others what we know and what we don’t.

And two, there needs to be more celebration of failure, and a culture that accepts it. That includes building safe places for people to admit they were wrong, like the Loss of Confidence Project .

But it’s clear this cultural change won’t come easily.

“In the end,” Rohrer says, after getting a lot of positive feedback on the project, “we ended up with just a handful of statements.”

We need a balance between convictions and humility

There’s a personal cost to an intellectually humble outlook. For me, at least, it’s anxiety.

When I open myself up to the vastness of my own ignorance, I can’t help but feel a sudden suffocating feeling. I have just one small mind, a tiny, leaky boat upon which to go exploring knowledge in a vast and knotty sea of which I carry no clear map.

Why is it that some people never seem to wrestle with those waters? That they stand on the shore, squint their eyes, and transform that sea into a puddle in their minds and then get awarded for their false certainty? “I don’t know if I can tell you that humility will get you farther than arrogance,” says Tenelle Porter, a University of California Davis psychologist who has studied intellectual humility.

Of course, following humility to an extreme end isn’t enough. You don’t need to be humble about your belief that the world is round. I just think more humility, sprinkled here and there, would be quite nice.

“It’s bad to think of problems like this like a Rubik’s cube: a puzzle that has a neat and satisfying solution that you can put on your desk,” says Michael Lynch , a University of Connecticut philosophy professor. Instead, it’s a problem “you can make progress at a moment in time, and make things better. And that we can do — that we can definitely do.”

For a democracy to flourish, Lynch argues, we need a balance between convictions — our firmly held beliefs — and humility. We need convictions, because “an apathetic electorate is no electorate at all,” he says. And we need humility because we need to listen to one another. Those two things will always be in tension.

The Trump presidency suggests there’s too much conviction and not enough humility in our current culture.

“The personal question, the existential question that faces you and I and every thinking human being, is, ‘How do you maintain an open mind toward others and yet, at the same time, keep your strong moral convictions?’” Lynch says. “That’s an issue for all of us.”

To be intellectually humble doesn’t mean giving up on the ideas we love and believe in. It just means we need to be thoughtful in choosing our convictions, be open to adjusting them, seek out their flaws, and never stop being curious about why we believe what we believe. Again, that’s not easy.

You might be thinking: “All the social science cited here about how intellectual humility is correlated with open-minded thinking — what if that’s all bunk?” To that, I’d say the research isn’t perfect. Those studies are based on self-reports, where it can be hard to trust that people really do know themselves or that they’re being totally honest. And we know that social science findings are often upended.

But I’m going to take it as a point of conviction that intellectual humility is a virtue. I’ll draw that line for myself. It’s my conviction.

Could I be wrong? Maybe. Just try to convince me otherwise.

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Intellectual Humility: Definitions, Questions, and Scott O. Lilienfeld as a Case Example

• First Online: 01 January 2023

Cite this chapter

• Shauna M. Bowes 4 ,
• Adele Strother 4 ,
• Rachel J. Ammirati 5 &
• Robert D. Latzman 6  

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In this chapter, we focus on the construct of intellectual humility (IH), which has been of increasing interest in psychological science over the last several years. We identify why IH is an important construct in psychology, review emerging research on its nature and boundaries, and highlight its potential utility in the domain of critical thinking and reasoning. To hopefully make these points come to life, we conclude the chapter with an overview of what we see as a model for IH in science. Specifically, we conclude with an account of how Dr. Scott O. Lilienfeld embodied key aspects of IH in his scientific pursuits, mentorship, and teaching. We see the study of IH as crucial for the future of psychological science and understanding cognitive bias proneness at large.

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The Power of Intellectual Humility

What does it mean to be intellectually humble when it counts.

Posted April 13, 2022 | Reviewed by Devon Frye

I enjoy talking to strangers when I’m travelling. This might be because I’m a psychologist, or because I always try to look for the best in people, or perhaps it’s a reflection of the fact that a dear family friend christened me “Tigger” when I was a child because of my apparently rampant extraversion .

Regardless, whether it’s in a cab, on a plane, or at a party, I’m likely to be the one happily chatting away with people I’ve never met before and will perhaps never see again. I’ve received primers on the history of tobacco in North Carolina, been subjected to multiple attempts at conversion by practitioners of various religions, discussed the question of whether all languages are in fact governed by universal laws, and been complimented as apparently “one of the good ones” (I try not to overthink that one now).

I take particular joy when strangers ask me what I do for a living. I always give them the same answer: I study happiness . They usually find this hilarious and tell me either that it suits my personality (a compliment?) or ask me what the keys to happiness are (I usually go with having close relationships, or not sweating the small stuff).

However, if I’m being honest, I’m not telling them the whole truth about what I study, which is how we can live good lives. That is—how we can live lives of happiness, meaning, and purpose by successfully overcoming the challenges, failures, and adversity that are defining features of our lives, and how can we successfully develop into the best version of ourselves.

The good life is not simply about feeling happy, but also doing things of value, feeling some control over your life, and figuring out what’s true about our world. These days, I tend to think that perhaps the most important key to living well is the ability to see and understand both yourself and the world for what it really is. This means having: a) an accurate sense of oneself, and b) insight into what we can and cannot control.

This is much harder than you’d think. We as individuals routinely believe that we’re better than average on pretty much any conceivable trait or ability. Many of us who grew up in cultural settings that prioritize individual choice and action further believe that we are masters of our universe and that we can bend our environment to meet our desires. This belief typically decreases as we age and are subjected to multiple life lessons that teach us the importance of luck in our lives.

Seeing the world for what it really is is a form of wisdom . But it turns out that being wise is very hard. We each have our own biases (towards our own preferred in-groups, our families, our countries, our ideological commitments) that often shield us from the truth. Are there traits of character that we can develop to ensure that we understand the world the way it is?

I think intellectual humility may be one such trait. Being intellectually humble involves understanding your cognitive limitations—in simpler terms, it means acknowledging that you could be wrong about something. If you’re not open to acknowledging that you could be wrong, you can’t learn anything new about the world; you’re not going to be able to change your beliefs and grow.

As a human being, you probably intuit that this is a very hard thing to do.

It turns out that there is some evidence that backs up this intuition . In a study my colleagues and I at Wake Forest University conducted in 2017, we asked college students twice a day for three weeks if they had exhibited the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors characteristic of intellectual humility in an argument with someone over the previous twelve hours. The students then rated the extent to which they sought out reasons for why their current opinions could be wrong and used new information to reevaluate their existing beliefs. It turns out that they were more likely to manifest humility in situations where they saw the person they were arguing with as moral and therefore trustworthy.

Conversely, they were less likely to deploy humility in situations where they found the interaction to be disagreeable. Interestingly, the content of the disagreement— morality , facts, personal opinions—didn’t have an impact on the degree of intellectual humility. More important was what the speaker thought of their interlocutor.

What does it mean to be intellectually humble when it counts? I don’t know, to be honest (See what I did there?). But perhaps one way forward is to be mindful of how easily we can slip into defensiveness when we get into arguments, given that we all too easily see critiques of our understanding as critiques of our character. If we can remind ourselves of this tendency, perhaps we can find a way to remind ourselves that our interlocutors are not bad people, and that we can disagree without being disagreeable. This is a hard task, especially in the current political climate, as engaging with people we disagree with in this manner takes trust, curiosity, and open-mindedness.

I’ve learned a lot from my fellow passengers on my travels—not only new insights in areas outside my expertise, but also how other Americans outside a university setting understand and approach their world. These conversations have not always been easy, and I have confronted my limits at times. For example, while I think I generally handle comments that are arguably prejudiced with some degree of grace, I have recently found debating with anti-vaxxers to be an impossible task. Understanding the world involves understanding the perspectives that others bring to it, and this requires both patience and skill that can sometimes be difficult to muster.

One key challenge, I think, is remaining intellectually humble and open-minded as you grow older and develop (reasonably justifiable) beliefs about your own competence and abilities. For example, as a psychologist with what I believe to be a deep understanding of the research on well-being and personality, as well as a broader appreciation of the scientific method and scientific thinking, I unconsciously approach most conversations that touch on these topics with an “expert” mindset. However, Socrates taught us many years ago that “knowing oneself” involved interrogating one’s claims to knowledge, and that true knowledge may in fact involve a deep recognition of one’s ignorance.

In a way, gaining knowledge also involves dealing with the curse of knowledge—that complacent feeling that you’ve got it all figured out. In academia, I’ve found that increasing seniority is typically met with deference and occasionally (unwarranted) veneration. As the classicist Edith Hall noted in a 2019 talk, remaining critical of one’s own ideas and open-minded to others’ views in such a context takes some pretty significant—and constant—effort.

Both our psychology and our contexts make admitting what we don’t know very hard. We care about fitting in with family and friends, maintaining our ideological commitments, and feeling good about ourselves, all of which make facing up to the truth challenging. But I think we are also creatures that care about the truth. Caring about the truth involves being vulnerable about what we don’t know and inhabiting such a state can be unnerving. However, I think that taking such chances in our daily lives is key to achieving a rich and fulfilling life.

This essay is reprinted from the book Radical Humility , published by Belt Publishing, and edited by Rebekah Modrak and Jamie Vander Broek.

Eranda Jayawickreme, Ph.D. , is the Harold W. Tribble Professor of Psychology and Senior Research Fellow at the Program for Leadership and Character at Wake Forest University.

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Defining Critical Thinking

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• Review Article
• Published: 27 June 2022

Predictors and consequences of intellectual humility

• Tenelle Porter   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-4037-0412 1 ,
• Abdo Elnakouri 2 ,
• Ethan A. Meyers   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-6171-6780 2 ,
• Takuya Shibayama 2 ,
• Eranda Jayawickreme 3 &
• Igor Grossmann   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-2681-3600 2  

Nature Reviews Psychology volume  1 ,  pages 524–536 ( 2022 ) Cite this article

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In a time of societal acrimony, psychological scientists have turned to a possible antidote — intellectual humility. Interest in intellectual humility comes from diverse research areas, including researchers studying leadership and organizational behaviour, personality science, positive psychology, judgement and decision-making, education, culture, and intergroup and interpersonal relationships. In this Review, we synthesize empirical approaches to the study of intellectual humility. We critically examine diverse approaches to defining and measuring intellectual humility and identify the common element: a meta-cognitive ability to recognize the limitations of one’s beliefs and knowledge. After reviewing the validity of different measurement approaches, we highlight factors that influence intellectual humility, from relationship security to social coordination. Furthermore, we review empirical evidence concerning the benefits and drawbacks of intellectual humility for personal decision-making, interpersonal relationships, scientific enterprise and society writ large. We conclude by outlining initial attempts to boost intellectual humility, foreshadowing possible scalable interventions that can turn intellectual humility into a core interpersonal, institutional and cultural value.

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Introduction.

Intellectual humility involves recognizing that there are gaps in one’s knowledge and that one’s current beliefs might be incorrect. For instance, someone might think that it is raining, but acknowledge that they have not looked outside to check and that the sun might be shining. Research on intellectual humility offers an intriguing avenue to safeguard against human errors and biases. Although it cannot eliminate them entirely, recognizing the limitations of knowledge might help to buffer people from some of their more authoritarian, dogmatic, and biased proclivities.

Although acknowledging the limits of one’s insights might be easy in low-stakes situations, people are less likely to exhibit intellectual humility when the stakes are high. For instance, people are unlikely to act in an intellectually humble manner when motivated by strong convictions or when their political, religious or ethical values seem to be challenged 1 , 2 . Under such circumstances, many people hold tightly to existing beliefs and fail to appreciate and acknowledge the viewpoints of others 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 . These social phenomena have troubled scholars and policymakers for decades 3 . Consequently, interest in cultivating intellectual humility has come from multiple research areas and subfields in psychology, including social-personality, cognitive, clinical, educational, and leadership and organizational behaviour 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 . Cumulatively, research suggests that intellectual humility can decrease polarization, extremism and susceptibility to conspiracy beliefs, increase learning and discovery, and foster scientific credibility 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 .

The growing interdisciplinary interest in intellectual humility has led to multiple definitions and assessments, raising a question about commonality across definitions of the concept. Claims about its presumed societal and individual benefits further raise questions about the strength of evidence that supports these claims.

In this Review, we provide an overview of empirical intellectual humility research. We first examine approaches for defining and measuring intellectual humility across various subfields in psychology, synthesizing the common thread across seemingly disparate definitions. We next describe how individual, interpersonal and cultural factors can work for or against intellectual humility. We conclude by highlighting the importance of intellectual humility and detailing interventions to increase its prevalence.

Defining intellectual humility

Intellectual humility is conceptually distinct from general humility, modesty, perspective-taking and open-mindedness 9 . Whereas general humility involves how people think about their shortcomings and strengths across domains, intellectual humility is chiefly concerned with epistemic limitations 16 . In a similar vein, modesty emphasizes increased social awareness and not wanting to monopolize the spotlight or draw too much attention to one’s accomplishments, whereas intellectual humility focuses on recognizing one’s ignorance and intellectual fallibility 17 . General humility and modesty are also psychometrically distinct from intellectual humility 18 , 19 .

There are subtle differences between intellectual humility and perspective-taking. Perspective-taking is the ability to recognize and understand alternative points of view 20 . By contrast, intellectual humility is the ability to recognize shortcomings or potential limitations in one’s own point of view. Building on perspective-taking, open-mindedness refers to unbiased or fair consideration of different views regardless of one’s beliefs 21 . Although open-mindedness is theoretically and empirically related to intellectual humility, being open-minded does not always involve considering the limitations of one’s knowledge or beliefs 22 , 23 . Although it is distinct from these related phenomena, intellectual humility has multiple definitions, reflecting its use in different fields.

Intellectual humility has a wide range of philosophical roots 24 , 25 , 26 , 27 . Some philosophical accounts focus on attributes of people who frequently exhibit intellectually humble thoughts and behaviour (such as the tendency to recognize one’s fallibility and own one’s limitations) 28 . Most accounts define intellectual humility as a virtuous balance between intellectual arrogance (overvaluing one’s beliefs) and intellectual diffidence (undervaluing one’s beliefs) 28 , 29 , 30 . This definition has its roots in the Aristotelian ideal of the Golden Mean — a calibration of particular virtues to the demands of the situation at hand 30 , 31 . Because situations vary in their demands, a logical consequence of the Aristotelian approach is that intellectual humility is virtuous only as a dynamic, situation-sensitive construct 30 , 31 , 32 . Simultaneously, the Aristotelian approach means that the same psychological characteristics attributed to intellectual humility are unlikely to always be virtuous 32 .

Psychological scientists also define intellectual humility in a myriad of ways. Some scholars approach intellectual humility as a form of metacognition, reflecting how people regulate and reflect on their beliefs and thoughts. This view emphasizes the inherent limitations of human knowledge and beliefs, such as recognizing that beliefs might be wrong and that opinions are based on partial information 9 , 29 , 33 , 34 . Other scholars approach intellectual humility as a multidimensional phenomenon, advocating that intellectual humility includes a combination of metacognition, valuing other people’s beliefs, admitting one’s ignorance or errors to other people, and being motivated by an intrinsic desire to seek the truth 35 , 36 , 37 .

Scholars favouring broader accounts of intellectual humility argue that a strict focus on metacognition excludes appreciation for other people’s insights, behavioural responses when one recognizes that they might be wrong or confused, and motives for thinking and acting. In turn, scholars who endorse a metacognitive account of intellectual humility argue that encumbering intellectual humility with multiple features weakens the ability to examine it with conceptual clarity and methodological rigour. For example, multidimensional instruments might be difficult to interpret because a person high in one dimension and low in another could receive the same intellectual humility score as someone with the opposite psychological profile.

Preference for these competing accounts of intellectual humility varies across subfields of psychology, linked to methodological preferences and historical emphasis on social and contextual factors. Cognitive psychologists tend to favour metacognitive accounts that emphasize how people think about evidence, knowledge and beliefs, without much attention to social contexts 13 . Conversely, developmental, educational and clinical psychologists tend to favour a multidimensional account that considers how real world, cognitive, behavioural and interpersonal factors come together to form intellectual humility 38 , 39 , 40 . Social and personality psychologists, including those in the applied organizational sciences, consider metacognitive and multidimensional accounts 9 , 33 . Rather than endorsing a single definition, these researchers call for a clear distinction when measuring unique features of intellectual humility to reveal how the distinctive features relate to and shape one another 41 .

A cumulative science of intellectual humility benefits from clear definitions and explicit modelling of relationships between psychological processes and behavioural outcomes. Despite different conceptual approaches, most philosophers and psychologists agree that intellectual humility necessarily includes recognizing one’s ignorance and intellectual fallibility 26 . Hence, we focus on the metacognitive features of intellectual humility because they have consensus support from the scholarly community. Furthermore, these features are empirically plausible: they are scientifically testable and hence falsifiable. Taking a middle ground between metacognitive and multidimensional accounts, we argue that consideration of interpersonal contexts is beneficial for understanding how intellectual humility manifests, what factors inhibit and promote it, and how intellectual humility can be developed. At the same time, isolating the metacognitive core of intellectual humility permits scholars to identify its contextual and interpersonal correlates and reduces the likelihood of mistakenly labelling distinct processes and outcomes as intellectual humility (the jingle fallacy) or providing distinct names to the same family of metacognitive components of intellectual humility (the jangle fallacy) 41 . Thus, we define intellectual humility in terms of a metacognitive core composed of recognizing the limits of one’s knowledge and awareness of one’s fallibility (Fig.  1 ). This core is expressed by demonstrations of intellectual humility through behaviour and valuing the intellect of others.

The core metacognitive components of intellectual humility (grey) include recognizing the limits of one’s knowledge and being aware of one’s fallibility. The peripheral social and behavioural features of intellectual humility (light blue) include recognizing that other people can hold legitimate beliefs different from one’s own and a willingness to reveal ignorance and confusion in order to learn. The boundaries of the core and peripheral region are permeable, indicating the mutual influence of metacognitive features of intellectual humility for social and behavioural aspects of the construct and vice versa.

Measuring intellectual humility

Psychological scientists have developed several measures of intellectual humility (Table  1 ). These measures can be organized in terms of the aspect of intellectual humility they target and the type of measure. In terms of aspect, some measures aim to capture intellectual humility as a trait — the degree to which people are intellectually humble in general — whereas others examine it as a state — the degree to which people are intellectually humble in specific contexts. In both cases, intellectual humility is measured along a continuum rather than as a binary measure.

One type of measurement is to ask participants to self-report on their intellectual humility in a questionnaire 26 . Questionnaires are used to assess trait and state (including belief-specific) intellectual humility. Another measurement type relies on behavioural tasks designed to elicit meaningful differences in a particular kind of response. For example, a researcher might ask people to play a game where the goal is to answer questions correctly and see how often participants delegate questions to more knowledgeable peers — an indication that people realize their own knowledge is incomplete (this task has been used to measure intellectual humility in children 38 ). Both of these measurement types can contribute to estimates of trait and state intellectual humility.

Questionnaires

Questionnaires are often used to assess intellectual humility. A trait questionnaire might ask how much a person “[accepts] that [their] beliefs and attitudes may be wrong” 9 . A belief-specific questionnaire on the issue of gun control might ask how much a person “[recognizes] that [their] views about gun control are based on limited evidence” 33 . A state questionnaire might ask how intellectually humble a person feels in the moment or how much they “searched actively for reasons why [their] beliefs might be wrong” during a recent disagreement or conflict 37 . A closely related self-report measure asks people to indicate, for example, their attitude change or depth of understanding. These self-report tasks have been used as indirect measures of intellectual humility 42 .

Over the last decade, psychological scientists have developed many questionnaire measures of intellectual humility at the trait level 26 . The popularity of these measures is due to some level of predictive capacity and cost-effectiveness. People seem to be capable of reporting on their trait level of intellectual humility with some degree of accuracy, as supported by small-to-moderate positive correlations between self-reported intellectual humility and peer-reported intellectual humility 9 , 11 , 19 , 43 . Scores on self-reported trait-level intellectual humility (across different measures) are also positively associated with scores on self-report measures of other epistemic traits, such as intellect and open-mindedness, and to behaviours understood to be central to intellectual humility (including information-seeking, cognitive flexibility, acknowledgement of intellectual failings and argument evaluation) 9 , 11 , 19 , 43 , 44 .

Nevertheless, trait-level questionnaires of intellectual humility have limitations. All questionnaires rely on subjective judgements and are therefore vulnerable to response biases. Relevant biases include not accurately recalling one’s past experience, selecting positive responses on the measure by default, seeing oneself more positively than is warranted and focusing on favourable group comparisons when evaluating one’s behaviour. Thus, self-reports of one’s general intellectual humility provides numerous opportunities for error 45 , 46 .

Finally, it is difficult to assess socially desirable constructs with self-report measures. Scores obtained via trait-style measures of intellectual humility positively correlate with social desirability bias. In situations where intellectual humility is desirable, such as a job interview, self-report questionnaires make it easy to create a false impression of high intellectual humility 47 , 48 . Notably, response biases are attenuated when intellectual humility questionnaires ask people to report how intellectually humble they were in specific interpersonal situations in their lives, highlighting the value of more contextualized assessment of responses to specific situations (or states) 49 . In particular, reporting on how one searched for information or whether one recognized one’s fallibility during a specific event does not require as much mental effort because of access to specific memory cues, compared to reporting on how intellectually humble one is across many situations. In addition, when recalling a specific situation, a desire to present oneself in a positive light might be trumped by a stronger desire to provide an honest response about a particular event. Thus, questionnaires that ask about intellectual humility in specific situations or relevant to specific events might be less vulnerable to response bias than questionnaires that measure trait-level intellectual humility.

In sum, trait-level questionnaires might seem to be an efficient tool for obtaining an initial, general picture about one’s intellectual humility. However, these scores should be considered in light of their limitations. Although trait measures can be useful for describing typical ways of being in the world, they are not particularly good at detecting variability. Thus, they are not well suited to studying how intellectual humility might vary in daily life or change in response to an intervention. In response to these limitations, some researchers have examined intellectual humility in specific contexts or in response to specific issues. Scholars studying these questions have developed state-specific questionnaires about one’s beliefs, reasoning or behaviour that tap into intellectual humility about specific issues, such as gun control, vaccine mandates or more mundane interpersonal disagreements 37 , 49 , 50 . State measures enable researchers to capture how people’s intellectual humility varies as they move through various contexts and situations 37 , 50 , 51 .

Although individuals differ in their trait-level intellectual humility, they can also demonstrate a high degree of systematic variation depending on the demands of specific contexts. Capturing only global self-perceptions of intellectual humility with a trait measure glosses over this variability and nuance. By contrast, focus on state-specific measures echoes modern personality science, which defines a trait via a person’s profile of states 52 , 53 . A person’s profile — when aggregating across state-specific expressions of a characteristic — is typically stable over time. At the same time, state-specific expression of a characteristic will systematically vary across situations. Indeed, daily diary and experience-sampling studies demonstrate substantial within-person variability in intellectual humility 37 , 50 .

When researchers are interested in people’s overall patterns of intellectual humility across situations and variability from situation to situation, we recommend integrating state and trait approaches by taking repeated situation-specific assessments. We recommend reports of intellectual humility in the context of specific situations. Ideally, these assessments should be administered multiple times. We suggest using trait-level assessments of intellectual humility only for research focused on people’s global attributions of intellectual humility to themselves (self-reports) or close others (informant reports). A profile of intellectual humility can be further established by modelling responses across multiple situations.

If researchers are solely interested in participants’ general self-perceptions of intellectual humility, trait assessments might be suitable, with the caveats outlined above. Notably, little work has directly compared benefits of trait assessments of intellectual humility to repeated situation-specific assessments of intellectual humility, and further research on this topic is needed.

Behavioural tasks

A key advantage of behavioural tasks over other measures is that their scores do not typically depend on subjective judgements and therefore are not as prone to response biases and faking 45 , 47 , 48 . For example, measuring whether a person delegates a question to a more knowledgeable peer captures a real behaviour in the moment, in contrast to a self-report of a person’s impression of their behaviour in general or in a past situation. In addition, behavioural tasks depend less on language than questionnaires and might therefore be better for assessing intellectual humility in young children or in different cultural contexts. Behavioural tasks also put all participants in the same situation with the same opportunity to exhibit intellectual humility. By comparison, estimates of intellectual humility via questionnaires suffer from the confound of natural variability in the opportunity to be intellectually humble in daily life.

Nonetheless, custom-designed behavioural tasks can be less effective at measuring typical rather than extraordinary performance 54 . Experimental tasks capture only a small segment of behaviour in an artificial situation contrived by a researcher. A participant might be highly motivated to perform well on the task by displaying high levels of intellectual humility, rendering a score that captures their maximal capacity rather than their typical or externally valid intellectual humility. Behavioural measures also assume that the assessed behaviour is motivated by recognizing one’s ignorance and intellectual fallibility, which might not always be the case. Such behaviour might be motivated by situational pressures or other processes not characteristic of intellectual humility.

Behavioural tasks typically sample situation-specific responses, presenting a challenge for scholars interested in a general, trait-level picture of intellectual humility. It might be possible to administer behavioural tasks multiple times to obtain a more complete picture of someone’s typical behaviour. However, repeated exposure to the same task risks undermining score validity as participants become bored or more familiar with the task procedures.

Overall, behavioural tasks offer a useful measurement approach for assessing intellectual humility, complementing questionnaires. Nevertheless, the development and use of behavioural tasks has lagged behind questionnaires. No research has yet developed a valid intellectual humility behavioural task by performing psychometric testing of theoretically expected associations with other constructs and outcomes, in contrast to the many published studies doing so for questionnaires.

Threats to intellectual humility

Being intellectually humble involves embracing uncertainty and ambiguity, and entertaining the possibility that even one’s closely held beliefs might be incorrect 9 . Thus, intellectual humility requires people to deliberately remain flexible in their beliefs 11 . However, many aspects of human psychology run counter to intellectual humility. We provide a non-exhaustive review of the personal, interpersonal and cultural factors that often work against intellectual humility (Fig.  2 ).

Threats include various metacognitive limitations, such as biased information search, overestimation of knowledge and failing to recognize unknowns, as well as situational factors. The nesting circles depict an individual (orange) contained within interpersonal (grey) and cultural (blue) spheres; threats apply across these levels. The arrows between the various threats depict the unidirectional (single-tipped) and mutual (double-tipped) influence each threat has on the other threats. The presence of one threat increases the likelihood that the other threats will emerge. Specific threats can further accentuate and interact with processes at other levels in a form of cross-level interaction.

Personal and interpersonal factors

When people try to reason through an issue, they often work hard to find evidence that confirms their initial perspective 55 , 56 , 57 , 58 . This process is often called confirmation or myside bias. Some theorists suggest that reasoning abilities have evolved to justify oneself and defend one’s reputations in front of others, so looking for confirmatory evidence to convince others of one’s good standing is a default strategy 59 , 60 . Because confirmatory search probably directs attention to arguments in support of one’s initial beliefs (rather than to the limits of one’s beliefs and their fallibility), this bias might act as a metacognitive limitation that runs counter to intellectual humility in many situations.

Even when a person desires to be intellectually humble, recognizing the limits of one’s knowledge requires overcoming metacognitive limitations that distort self-appraisal. For example, people tend to confidently overestimate how much they know about various phenomena — such as how a zip fastener works, how snow forms or how a helicopter takes flight — and become aware of their lack of knowledge only after failing to explain the phenomenon 61 , 62 , 63 , 64 . Moreover, people often fail to distinguish their knowledge from the knowledge of other people. Simply being aware that others understand how something works can result in people overestimating how much they understand the same phenomenon 65 . Thus, people struggle to recognize the limits of their knowledge and their fallibility — two core meta-cognitive features of intellectual humility.

Intellectual humility also involves accepting uncertainty about one’s beliefs. Although people differ in their tolerance of uncertainty and ambiguity, many find uncertainty disquieting or avoid it altogether in situations that are personally threatening 66 . To overcome the threat, people tend to become more self-focused and eager to cling to unambiguous, comforting beliefs, rather than seeking to understand more ambiguous truths 34 , 67 . Consequently, personal threats can lead to thinking in terms of extremes and absolutes (‘black and white’ thinking) and an unwillingness to recognize one’s limited perspective and potential fallibility 68 , 69 , 70 , 71 . For example, people who were made to feel highly threatened in an experiment became less comfortable considering opposing political opinions and were more wary of members of political outgroups compared to people who were made to feel only moderately threatened 72 . Feelings of personal threat might therefore interfere with the ability to exhibit intellectual humility.

Intellectual humility can also be hard to manifest and sustain when acknowledging the limitations of one’s beliefs would risk compromising interpersonal relationships. When members of cultural, religious, political or other social groups conform to the group’s ideology, they feel closer to one another 73 , 74 , 75 , 76 . Thus, people might reflexively adhere to their groups’ beliefs to strengthen relationships with other members of the group 77 , 78 , 79 . Group solidarity might therefore trump intellectual humility. For example, when embedded within ideologically homogeneous (versus varied) social networks, people become more resistant over time to changing their ideological beliefs — a tendency diametrically opposite to intellectual humility 80 , 81 . When a ‘group’s truth’ collides with reality, intellectual humility will be hard to come by.

The motive to attain status within one’s community might also work against intellectual humility 82 . Group members often gain prestige and rank by fervently endorsing the group’s ideology 57 , 83 , 84 , 85 . Espousing the group’s beliefs serves as a form of self-persuasion, further convincing people that the views they endorse must be correct, while moving further away from intellectual humility 86 , 87 , 88 .

However, fervently endorsing a group’s ideology does not mean that one is unlikely to show intellectual humility in general. People might endorse their group’s political dogmas while also being mindful of their intellectual limitations when arguing with individuals within the group. People become more intellectually humble during interpersonal conflicts when they feel connected to their group compared to situations when they feel disconnected 42 , 89 . This insight suggests that one might show little intellectual humility when endorsing group dogmas, while simultaneously displaying intellectual humility with close others (in the group). This situational dependency emphasizes the variability of intellectual humility as a construct.

Cultural factors

Cultural contexts shape how people think and process information 90 , 91 and have the potential to influence whether they think in intellectually humble ways. For instance, people living in societies that emphasize interdependence in social coordination (such as Japan) tend to reflect on the mental states of others more, define the self through relationships with others, and are better able to avoid underweighting contextual information, relative to people living in more independent contexts (such as the USA) 92 , 93 . More generally, societies that emphasize interdependence rather than independence are more likely to promote relational goals, pay attention to social cues, define the self as embedded within one’s social environment and display social context vigilance 92 , 93 , 94 , 95 . Furthermore, people in communities that rely on interdependent social coordination for their food, such as fishing or rice farming, display more sensitivity to contextual information than people from communities that rely on individual-focused herding or wheat farming 96 , 97 .

Consideration of contextual information and mentalizing might be conducive to greater recognition of the limits of one’s knowledge and awareness of one’s fallibility. Indeed, there is some evidence for within-and between-country differences in intellectual humility. Within China, people from regions that rely on rice farming tend to display greater intellectual humility when reflecting on social conflicts compared to people from regions that rely on wheat farming 98 . In cross-cultural comparisons, individuals from countries that emphasize social coordination more, such as Japan or China, spontaneously show more intellectual humility in reflections on social conflicts compared to individuals in the USA and Canada 99 , 100 .

Overall, intellectual humility can be influenced by many factors, from personal cognitive habits to cultural contexts. Individuals are usually motivated to confirm their prior beliefs, to feel as though they know more than they actually do and to avoid opposing opinions when threatened. A desire to maintain interpersonal bonds can also tempt people to believe blindly in group ‘truths’. Simultaneously, people’s interpersonal and cultural contexts can make them more or less intellectually humble when dealing with others. Feeling accepted by one’s peers might promote intellectual humility during social conflicts. Finally, interdependent cultural contexts that require a high level of social coordination tend to promote ways of thinking that are sensitive to context and conducive to intellectual humility.

Importance of intellectual humility

The willingness to recognize the limits of one’s knowledge and fallibility can confer societal and individual benefits, if expressed in the right moment and to the proper extent. This insight echoes the philosophical roots of intellectual humility as a virtue 30 , 31 . State and trait intellectual humility have been associated with a range of cognitive, social and personality variables (Table  2 ). At the societal level, intellectual humility can promote societal cohesion by reducing group polarization and encouraging harmonious intergroup relationships. At the individual level, intellectual humility can have important consequences for wellbeing, decision-making and academic learning.

Notably, empirical research has provided little evidence regarding the generalizability of the benefits or drawbacks of intellectual humility beyond the unique contexts of WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic) societies 90 . With this caveat, below is an initial set of findings concerning the implications of possessing high levels of intellectual humility. Unless otherwise specified, the evidence below concerns trait-level intellectual humility. After reviewing these benefits, we consider attempts to improve an individual’s intellectual humility and confer associated benefits.

Social implications

People who score higher in intellectual humility are more likely to display tolerance of opposing political and religious views, exhibit less hostility toward members of those opposing groups, and are more likely to resist derogating outgroup members as intellectually and morally bankrupt 101 , 102 , 103 . Although intellectually humbler people are capable of intergroup prejudice 104 , they are more willing to question themselves and to consider rival viewpoints 104 . Indeed, people with greater intellectual humility display less myside bias, expose themselves to opposing perspectives more often and show greater openness to befriending outgroup members on social media platforms 19 , 22 , 102 . By comparison, people with lower intellectual humility display features of cognitive rigidity and are more likely to hold inflexible opinions and beliefs 9 , 11 .

In addition to being associated with intergroup tolerance, intellectual humility is also associated with engaged cooperation with outgroup members. In both state and trait form, intellectually humbler people are more willing to let outgroup members speak freely and show greater interest in joining bipartisan groups aimed at discussing political issues 34 , 105 . Individuals showing greater state intellectual humility are also more cooperative after thinking through their position in a public goods game — in which they have to decide how much to contribute to a common pool that will be redistributed to all players — an effect that contrasts with the typical finding that deliberation leads to greater selfishness 106 , 107 . People showing higher intellectual humility are therefore less likely to demonize groups with opposing views and tend to be open to the possibility of engagement and cooperation.

Intellectual humility is also associated with intentions to forgive and reconcile with others who have hurt one or offended one’s beliefs 40 , 108 . Furthermore, intellectual humility might support interpersonal cohesion by reducing derogative behaviours during arguments, such as labelling opponents as malicious or unintelligent 19 , 109 . Closed-minded thinking can lead individuals to disparage others’ opinions or arguments 110 . Conversely, intellectual humility is associated with open-mindedness and a willingness to learn about differing perspectives, which might promote respectful debate 19 .

The willingness to acknowledge one’s intellectual limitations might also have important implications for interpersonal relationships. Intellectual humility is positively associated with multiple values, including empathy, gratitude, altruism, benevolence and universalism, which suggests that people with greater intellectual humility are more likely to value and care about the wellbeing of others 111 . Intellectual humility might also be instrumental in maintaining interpersonal relationships in the face of social adversity. For example, state intellectual humility is associated with higher positive affect and sense of closeness towards others following an interpersonal conflict 112 .

Overall, people reporting greater intellectual humility tend to be more open to opposing perspectives and more forgiving of others’ offences. However, because this empirical evidence is cross-sectional, it remains to be seen whether intellectual humility causes these social benefits.

Individual benefits

Intellectual humility might also have direct consequences for individuals’ wellbeing. People who reason about social conflicts in an intellectually humbler manner and consider others’ perspectives (components of wise reasoning) are more likely to report higher levels of life satisfaction and less negative affect compared to people who do not 41 . Leaders who are higher in intellectual humility are also higher in emotional intelligence and receive higher satisfaction ratings from their followers, which suggests that intellectual humility could benefit professional life 113 , 114 . Nonetheless, intellectual humility is not associated with personal wellbeing in all contexts: religious leaders who see their religious beliefs as fallible have lower wellbeing relative to leaders who are less intellectually humble in their beliefs 115 .

Intellectual humility might also help people to make well informed decisions. Intellectually humbler people are better able to differentiate between strong and weak arguments, even if those arguments go against their initial beliefs 9 . Intellectual humility might also protect against memory distortions. Intellectually humbler people are less likely to claim falsely that they have seen certain statements before 116 . Likewise, intellectually humbler people are more likely to scrutinize misinformation and are more likely to intend to receive the COVID-19 vaccine 109 , 117 .

Lastly, intellectual humility is positively associated with knowledge acquisition, learning and educational achievement. Intellectually humbler people are more motivated to learn and more knowledgeable about general facts 39 . Likewise, intellectually humbler high school and university students expend greater effort when learning difficult material, are more receptive to assignment feedback and earn higher grades 14 , 118 .

Despite evidence of individual benefits associated with intellectual humility, much of this work is correlational. Thus, associations could be the product of confounding factors such as agreeableness, intelligence or general virtuousness. Longitudinal or experimental studies are needed to address the question of whether and under what circumstances intellectual humility promotes individual benefits. Notably, philosophical theorizing about the situation-specific virtuousness of the construct suggests that high levels of intellectual humility are unlikely to benefit all people in all situations 30 , 31 .

Improving intellectual humility

Given the apparent benefits of intellectual humility in various contexts, it might be desirable to increase one’s level of intellectual humility. Daily diary and experience-sampling studies, along with cross-cultural surveys, show that people’s level of intellectual humility systematically varies within and across individuals facing different ecological and situational demands, creating opportunities for intervention 34 , 37 , 50 , 119 . Initial evidence suggests several promising techniques for boosting intellectual humility (Fig.  3 ).

Process model through which situational triggers (yellow) can produce either greater intellectual humility (blue) or intellectual arrogance (red). The left box (grey) depicts strategies that boost intellectual humility (blue) and strategies that hinder intellectual humility (red). Some construal-based and metacognitive interventions help to boost intellectual humility. Other strategies, such as self-immersion or rigid focus on stability, can result in failure to acknowledge one’s fallibility and the limits of knowledge.

Some experiments have documented short-term gains in intellectual humility following brief reflection, writing or reading exercises that are carefully designed to shift intellectual humility in the moment. Participants showed higher levels of intellectual humility after reflecting on experiences by taking a step back and envisioning themselves from the vantage point of a distant observer (self-distanced), rather than imagining themselves living out a particular situation (self-immersed) 34 . In other experiments, participants self-reported higher levels of intellectual humility after reflecting on real-life trust betrayal scenarios (involving disagreements or interpersonal conflicts) from a self-distanced rather than a self-immersed perspective 1 , 120 .

In a series of studies, people overestimated their self-reported knowledge of a policy less after writing a detailed explanation of how that policy works, thereby recognizing that their knowledge of the policy was less complete than they originally thought (overcoming the ‘illusion of understanding’) 63 , 121 , 122 . Likewise, people reported less confidence when answering a question if they first identified their ‘known unknowns’ by listing two things they did not know 123 . In another study, simply reading about the benefits of being intellectually humble, as opposed to being highly certain, also boosted self-reported intellectual humility 118 . Similarly, reading a short, persuasive article about intelligence being a malleable characteristic that can be developed, as compared to a fixed characteristic that is mostly genetically determined, increased self-reported state intellectual humility 19 . These studies collectively suggest that intellectual humility can be temporary boosted through simple, low-cost techniques.

Though promising, most of these experiments were run on small to medium-sized samples and have not been subject to replication. Two exceptions are the self-distancing effect, which has been replicated in several studies, and research on the illusion of understanding. In the latter domain, the original study showed that writing a detailed explanation of how a policy worked reduced both overestimation of knowledge and attitude extremity 121 . A close replication of the original study revealed that the manipulation reduced overestimation of knowledge but did not change people’s extreme attitudes 124 . In addition, the majority of studies reviewed above used self-report questionnaires to measure intellectual humility or other indicators of intellectual humility. Behavioural measures and larger, more representative samples would shed more light on the extent to which brief interventions can boost intellectual humility.

A few intervention studies have sought to measure the effects of intellectual humility training beyond a single session. In a randomized control trial, participants were assigned to a month-long diary activity that was either self-distanced or self-immersed 125 . Participants in the intervention group wrote daily reflections on important issues from a self-distanced perspective, and those in the comparison group did the same from a self-immersed perspective. Participants in the intervention group showed higher positive change in intellectual humility (coded from written narratives) between time points before and after the intervention 125 . Two further studies sought to increase intellectual humility through secondary and undergraduate philosophy courses. In one quasi-experimental study, a lesson on intellectual humility was either included at the beginning of a five-week undergraduate philosophy class or not. At the end of the course, students who received the lesson showed greater levels of compromise-seeking in conflicts and were perceived by their peers as having higher intellectual humility than those in a control group. However, the lesson did not increase self-reported intellectual humility 126 . Likewise, high school and middle school student participants in a week-long philosophy summer camp for at least three years self-reported somewhat higher intellectual humility relative to a control group of students who attended only one or two week-long sessions of the camp, although this difference was not statistically significant 127 . Critically, neither of the latter two interventions used a randomized design, so selection bias — in which one comparison group systematically differs from the other on a variable other than receiving the intervention — might be responsible for the effects. Overall, research supports the use of self-distanced diary writing to increase intellectual humility. By contrast, evidence remains limited and inconclusive on whether intellectual humility can be increased through classroom instruction.

Summary and future directions

Recognizing one’s ignorance and intellectual fallibility are core features of intellectual humility. Intellectually humbler people seem to be more curious and better liked as leaders, and tend to make more thorough, well informed decisions. Intellectually humbler people also seem to be more open to cooperating with those whose views differ from their own. These habits of mind could be vital for confronting many of the challenges facing societies today, and beneficial to laypeople, policy makers and scientists (Box  1 ).

Despite the wealth of current insights on intellectual humility, a range of critical themes remain unexplored. One challenge is to understand when exactly intellectual humility becomes too much of a good thing. Arguably, contexts calling for judgement by a certain deadline and/or based on a pre-defined set of existing facts (such as in a legal court, war room or executive business meeting) can benefit from intellectual humility only when permitted by time and the due process of law. In moments that require decisive action, focusing on one’s fallibility and limits of knowledge might not be the best strategy. Intuitions about the bounded utility of intellectual humility are corroborated by qualitative interviews with military personnel and business employees 128 . Moreover, situational contexts in which intellectual humility helps or does not help remain unexplored. Research identifying when and for whom intellectual humility becomes disadvantageous would help to address this gap.

Most research on intellectual humility has considered humility to be characterized by a relatively stable way in which a particular person behaves across situations 32 . More work is required to understand how intellectual humility varies within a particular person in different situations and domains and how organizations and cultures differ in intellectual humility. Future work will need to explore the causal links between a culture’s emphasis on interdependence in social coordination and intellectual humility. Studies that measure intellectual humility across multiple domains and in multiple societies 99 will also lead to a better understanding of how cultural social coordination might shape intellectual humility in different domains. For example, large threats such as war, natural disasters or pandemics might increase the need for interdependence in social coordination, creating a culture that encourages people to be intellectually humble during social conflict with close friends and family. In turn, this intellectual humility might increase the capacity for social coordination at the expense of intellectual humility with strangers or those who question ideological orthodoxies, to safeguard social coordination from further threat 99 .

Interventions offer another avenue for future research. It remains to be seen whether interventions to boost intellectual humility can meaningfully address difficult societal problems such as polarization, misinformation and conspiracy beliefs. Perhaps helping individuals become more aware of their intellectual fallibility could address such problems. Intellectual humility interventions might also need to incorporate social-contextual elements, such as changing organizational cultures, to produce meaningful improvements. Future intervention studies should also test whether and how long effects endure and to identify optimal interventions to induce long-lasting change in intellectual humility 129 .

Future research should also explore the role of larger cultural forces, such as media landscapes and public communication, in promoting or reducing intellectual humility. Public figures are often denigrated in the media for changing their minds or admitting mistakes 130 . News media also typically avoid reporting areas of uncertainty or ambiguity in favour of definitive stories, even though communicating uncertainty can promote trust in science 131 , 132 , 133 (though see ref. 134 ). Individuals might be able to embrace intellectual humility only to the extent that institutions validate and support it. Thus, interventions that normalize intellectual humility in public communication should be studied to determine their potential impact on both individuals and societies.

In the spirit of intellectual humility, we conclude by pointing out that intellectual humility is not a panacea. Although it promises to counter societal incivility and misinformation, intellectual humility is cognitively effortful and is insufficient for addressing many other societal challenges. Moreover, a systemic approach is needed to foster intellectual humility at scale. Such an approach could involve a range of incremental changes that afford each person greater recognition of the limits of their knowledge and awareness of their fallibility. This approach to fostering intellectual humility calls for societal change in educational, scientific and business cultures: away from treating intellectual humility as a weakness and towards treating it as a core value that is celebrated and reinforced. Individual-focused interventions to boost intellectual humility are not likely to be effective in the long term without corresponding societal changes.

Box 1 Intellectual humility in science

The scientific enterprise is inherently imbued with uncertainty: when new data emerge, older ideas and models ought to be revised to accommodate the new findings. Thus, intellectual humility might be particularly important for scientists for its role in enabling scientific progress. Acknowledging the fallibility of scientific results via replication studies can help scientists to revise their beliefs about evidence for particular scientific phenomena 149 . Furthermore, scientific claims are typically probabilistic, and communication of the full finding requires communication of the uncertainty intervals around estimates. For example, within psychology, most phenomena are multidetermined and complex. Moreover, most new psychological findings are provisional, with a gap between laboratory observation and application in real-world contexts. Finally, most findings in psychological sciences focus on explaining the past, and are not always well equipped for predicting reactions to critical social issues 150 . Critically, prediction is by definition more uncertain than (post-hoc) explanation, yet in most instances it is also of greater practical value. Focusing on predictions to test our understanding of causal models in sciences can be a powerful way to foster intellectual humility. In turn, emphasizing the general value of intellectual humility can help scientists to commit to predictions, even if such predictions turn out to be wrong.

Because of uncertainty around individual scientific findings, communication of scientific insights to policy makers, journalists and the public requires scientists to be intellectually humble 15 . Despite worry by some scientists that communicating uncertainty would lower public trust in science 151 , 152 , there is little conclusive evidence to support this claim 153 . Whereas communicating consensus uncertainty — that is, uncertainty in expert opinions on an issue — can have negative effects on trust, communicating technical uncertainty in estimates or models via confidence intervals or similar techniques has either positive or null effects for perception of scientific credibility 154 . At the same time, members of the public who show greater intellectual humility are better able to separate scientific facts from misinformed fictions.

Although intellectual humility is fundamental for science, scientists often shy away from reporting complex data patterns, preferring (often unrealistically) clear, ‘groundbreaking’ results 15 . Recognition of the limits of knowledge and of theoretical models can be beneficial for increasing credibility within the scientific community. Embracing intellectual humility in science via transparent and systematic reporting on limitations of scientific models and constraints on generality has the potential to improve the scientific enterprise 155 . Within science, intellectual humility could help to reduce the file-drawer problem (the publication bias toward statistically significant or otherwise desirable results) — calibrate scientific claims to the relevant evidence, buffer against exaggeration, prevent motivated cognition and selective reporting of results that affirm one’s hypotheses, and increase the tendency to welcome scholarly critique.

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Acknowledgements

The present research was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (doctoral scholarship 767-2020-2395 to A.E. and Insight grant 435-2014-0685 to I.G.), by a postgraduate scholarship-doctoral grant PGSD3-547482-2020 from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (to E.A.M.), by an Early Researcher award ER16-12-169 from the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation (to I.G.), by the John Templeton Foundation (grant 61942 to T.P., grant 61514 to E.J. and grant 62260 to I.G.) and by the Templeton World Charity Foundation (grant TWCF0355 to E.J. and I.G.).

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Porter, T., Elnakouri, A., Meyers, E.A. et al. Predictors and consequences of intellectual humility. Nat Rev Psychol 1 , 524–536 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44159-022-00081-9

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What Does Intellectual Humility Look Like?

November 3, 2021

by Mark Leary, Greater Good Magazine

All of us have experienced situations in which we needed more confidence—in the classroom, on the athletic field, at work, on stage, or in our social lives. Along the way, our parents, teachers, coaches, friends, and partners have (hopefully) tried to help us feel more sure of ourselves. 

However, there’s one domain of life in which most of us could do with a little  less  confidence. When it comes to our beliefs and opinions, most of us are much more confident than we should be.  

A few years ago, I asked a sample of adults to think about all of the disagreements that they have with other people, from minor disagreements about relatively unimportant issues to major disagreements about important matters. Then, I asked them to estimate the percentage of disagreements they have with other people in which they are the one who is correct.

Only 4% of the respondents indicated they were right less than half of the time, and only 14% said they were right half of the time. The vast majority—a whopping 82%—reported that, when they disagreed with other people, they were usually the one who was right! (Pause a moment to ask yourself the same question: In what percentage of the disagreements that you have with other people are  you  the one who’s right?)

Research on the overconfidence bias shows that people regularly overestimate their abilities, knowledge, and beliefs. For example, when researchers ask people how certain they are that their answers to questions of fact are correct, people’s confidence consistently exceeds the actual accuracy of their answers. Psychologist Scott Plous has noted that overconfidence is not only the most pervasive bias that plagues human thinking and decision-making, but it’s also the most “catastrophic” in that it leads to bad decisions and other negative outcomes.  

The first step in dealing with overconfidence is for people to realize that much of what they believe to be true might, in fact, be incorrect. Psychologists call this awareness of one’s fallibility “intellectual humility.” 

People who are intellectually humble know that their beliefs, opinions, and viewpoints are fallible because they realize that the evidence on which their beliefs are based could be limited or flawed or that they may not have the expertise or ability to understand and evaluate the evidence. Intellectual humility involves understanding that we can’t fully trust our beliefs and opinions because we might be relying on faulty or incomplete information or are incapable of understanding the details. 

Of course, it rarely feels like our beliefs are wrong, and we must usually behave as if our beliefs are true or else we’ll be paralyzed by uncertainty and indecision. But people who are high in intellectual humility keep in mind that whatever they believe to be true could be wrong and, thus, they might need to revise their views at any time. 

We all vary in how intellectually humble we are in different situations. Sometimes we recognize (and may even acknowledge) that we might be wrong, and sometimes we vehemently defend our positions even when the evidence is a bit shaky. But, although we all shows signs of low and high intellectual humility from time to time, some people tend to be more intellectually humble overall than other people are.

Psychologists have developed a number of measures to study intellectual humility, but here are items from the  General Intellectual Humility Scale , which I developed with my colleague Rick Hoyle and our students. People rate how well each statement describes them on a five-point scale from “not at all like me” to “very much like me.” 

• I question my own opinions, positions, and viewpoints because they could be wrong.
• I reconsider my opinions when presented with new evidence.
• I recognize the value in opinions that are different from my own.
• I accept that my beliefs and attitudes may be wrong.
• In the face of conflicting evidence, I am open to changing my opinions.
• I like finding out new information that differs from what I already think is true.

Using this and other measures, researchers have examined how people’s level of intellectual humility infuses their thoughts, emotions, motives, and social behaviors. The research so far gives us an idea of what intellectual humility looks like—and what kinds of personalities tend to be most humble.

Features of intellectual humility

One of our studies  showed that people high in intellectual humility were more attentive to the quality of the evidence in an article about the value of dental flossing, more clearly distinguishing good from bad reasons to floss. Because they realize that their beliefs might be wrong, intellectually humble people pay more attention to the quality of the evidence on which their beliefs are based.  

In another  study  in which participants read sentences about controversial topics, intellectually humble participants spent more time reading sentences that expressed viewpoints counter to their own opinions than participants low in intellectual humility, suggesting that they were thinking more deeply about ideas with which they disagreed. 

(Low and high intellectual humility participants didn’t differ in the time they spent reading sentences consistent with their attitudes.) Along the same lines, a  study  by Tenelle Porter and Karina Schumann found that people higher in intellectual humility were more interested in understanding the reasons that people disagree with them.  

These and other findings suggest that people high in intellectual humility pay greater attention to the evidence for and against their beliefs and spend more time thinking about beliefs with which others disagree. Not surprisingly, people who are aware that their views might be wrong are more inclined to think about the accuracy of their beliefs than people who assume that they’re right about most things. 

Intellectual humility is also associated with the desire to learn new information. People who are high in intellectual humility score  higher in epistemic curiosity , which is the motivation to pursue new knowledge and ideas. Their higher curiosity seems to be motivated both by the fact they enjoy learning new information and by the distress they feel when they lack information or do not understand something. High intellectual humility is also associated with the degree to which people enjoy thinking, mulling over issues, and solving intellectual problems. People higher in intellectual humility like to think more than people low in intellectual humility do.  

So, people high in intellectual humility more carefully consider the evidence on which their beliefs are based, are vigilant to the possibility that they might be incorrect, consider the perspectives of other informed people (including those whose viewpoints differ from theirs), and revise their views when evidence warrants. 

One possible downside of thinking so much about the accuracy of one’s beliefs may be lower efficiency when making decisions. People who are higher in intellectual humility may consult more sources of information (including other people), consider information more carefully, and weigh more alternatives than people lower in intellectual humility. Because there is a trade-off between speed and accuracy when drawing conclusions, intellectually humble people may take longer to make decisions. At the same time, they may also be more accurate.

The trouble with too much confidence

Intellectual humility is fundamentally a meta-cognitive construct—that is, it involves people’s thoughts about their thoughts—but it often manifests in people’s emotions and behavior.  

Most notably, in disagreements with other people, people high in intellectual humility are  more open to other people’s views  and less dogmatic regarding their beliefs and opinions. People who recognize that their beliefs are fallible take other people’s perspectives more seriously and recognize the value of divergent opinions.  

Several studies also show that they are less inclined to disparage people who have different viewpoints than they do. In contrast, people who are  lower in intellectual humility  have stronger emotional reactions when people disagree with them and disregard or disparage people who hold different views.  

Given they are more open to other people’s ideas and less contentious when others disagree with them, people higher in intellectual humility are liked better than those lower in intellectual humility. Even after only 30 minutes of interaction, people rate those who are high in intellectual humility  more positively  than those who are low. Ironically, know-it-alls often don’t seem to know that other people don’t like know-it-alls.

This doesn’t mean that people high in intellectual humility don’t mind being wrong. They do, but for reasons that are different from low intellectual humility people. People high in intellectual humility sometimes find their ignorance and intellectual limitations troubling—not because they lose disagreements with other people but because they want to understand the world.

In addition to fueling conflict and causing hard feelings, low intellectual humility can create practical problems. 

For example, low intellectual humility undermines people’s willingness to negotiate or compromise. Disagreements become intractable when people are unwilling to consider the possibility that their personal views might be, if not incorrect, at least no better overall than other people’s perspectives. If I’m certain that I’m totally right, why should I take other people’s misguided perspectives into account? Intellectual humility should pave the way toward more negotiation and compromise, which are difficult when all parties are firmly convinced that they are correct.  

People who are intolerant of views that differ from theirs can also stifle open and honest discussions. For example, leaders who are not open to divergent ideas inhibit group members from offering their views, potentially short-circuiting creative and valuable ideas. In contrast, intellectually humble leaders who are open to alternative views may  motivate others  to contribute more ideas to discussions.  

Given that intellectual humility is related to how people deal with disagreements, it’s not surprising that it is associated with the quality of people’s close relationships. My research group conducted a study that examined how intellectual humility relates to people’s ratings of their partners and relationships. The study found that men who were higher in intellectual humility were more satisfied with their partners and relationships than men low in intellectual humility. Perhaps more importantly, the female partners of men high in intellectual humility were more satisfied, as well.  

Interestingly, the men’s level of intellectual humility was more strongly related to their and their partners’ ratings of the relationship than the women’s level was. I suspect that low intellectually humble men tend to display a more toxic style of dealing with disagreements than low intellectually humble women do.

What influences intellectual humility?

Intellectual humility clearly has personal, practical, and social benefits. But what leads some people to be more intellectually humble than others? Given that intellectual humility is a very new research topic, not much work on this question has been conducted, but we can speculate based on research in related areas.  

First, given that virtually every personal characteristic has at least a weak genetic basis, it would be surprising if intellectual humility was not partly heritable. Indirect support for this idea comes from the fact that intellectual humility correlates with both overconfidence and openness, both of which show evidence of genetic influences. 

Learning also plays a role in intellectual humility as children observe how parents, teachers, and others express certainty and uncertainty about their beliefs, manage disagreements with other people, and change—or do not change—their minds when evidence warrants. Some parents may also encourage their children to explain and justify their beliefs, attitudes, and decisions, thereby teaching the importance of basing one’s views on evidence and reason. Parents also differ in the degree to which they encourage their children to be open to new ideas and experiences, which may contribute to intellectual humility.

Education, especially higher education, may also affect intellectual humility—but in two opposing ways.  

On one hand, the more people learn, the more they see how much they do not know and come to realize that knowledge is exceptionally complicated, nuanced, and endless. On the other hand, the more people learn, the more justifiably confident they become the areas in which they develop expertise. An expert should obviously be more confident of their beliefs in that domain than a non-expert. Although no direct evidence exists, education may increase intellectual humility overall, while (justifiably) increasing certainty—and lowering intellectual humility—in areas in which a person is an expert.

Cultures vary in the degree to which they value openness and tolerate uncertainty. Some cultures lead people to experience anxiety in situations that are ambiguous or unpredictable, and these cultures are structured in ways that make the world seem more stable and predictable through strict rules and laws, shared beliefs, and circumscribed ways of behaving. Such cultures probably discourage intellectual humility because they regard uncertainty as threatening and encourage people to adopt a common set of beliefs. (In case you’re wondering, the United States ranks relatively high—in the top 20% of all countries—in acceptance of openness and uncertainty, as do other countries as diverse as Denmark, Singapore, the U.K., and India.)

Certain belief systems may also discourage intellectual humility. For example, most religions teach that they alone have the truth and strongly discourage people from considering that those beliefs might be wrong. Of course, nonreligious people may also be low in intellectual humility; atheists are often as convinced that their views are correct as religious fundamentalists are.  

Interestingly, though, neither religiosity (the degree to which people believe in and practice a religion) nor political orientation or affiliation is  consistently related  to intellectual humility. What matters is the extremism of their beliefs: As religious and political views become more extreme—in whatever direction—intellectual humility falls. 

Across a number of beliefs, intellectual humility is curvilinearly related to the extremity of people’s beliefs, such that people with moderate beliefs tend to be higher in intellectual humility than people who hold extreme beliefs. To say it differently, people with more extreme views—for example, people whose political views are farther toward the left or right—tend to be  lower in intellectual humility  and, thus, less willing to consider that their viewpoints might be incorrect than people who have moderate beliefs. This pattern may occur because moderate views often acknowledge the complexity and equivocal nature of complicated issues.  

How can we become more intellectually humble? 

In an ideal world, people’s judgments about the accuracy of their beliefs, opinions, and viewpoints would be perfectly calibrated to their actual validity. People make the best decisions about what to believe and what to do when judgments of their correctness are accurate.  

Unfortunately, most of us overestimate the accuracy of our beliefs and opinions, often badly, with little consideration of the possibility that we might be wrong. Fortunately, people can increase in intellectual humility both through a personal decision to be more intellectually humble and through interventions that help people confront their intellectual overconfidence and take steps to reduce it.  

Of course, people aren’t likely to change their views or behavior unless they perceive some benefit in doing so. So, people must see that approaching the world in a more intellectually humble fashion is both rational and beneficial.  

Intellectual humility is rational in the sense that we can’t all be right in most of our disagreements, we are often irrationally overconfident, and the evidence on which our beliefs and viewpoints are based is often rather flimsy. So, why would rational people be as sure of themselves as most of us are?

None of us thinks that our beliefs and attitudes are incorrect; if we did, we obviously wouldn’t hold those beliefs and attitudes. Yet, despite our sense that we are usually correct, we must accept that our views may sometimes turn out to be wrong. This kind of humility isn’t simply virtuous—the research suggests that it results in better decisions, relationships, and outcomes. So, the next time you feel certain about something, you might stop and ask yourself:  Could I be wrong?

About the author: 

Mark Leary, Ph.D. , is Garonzik Family Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University.  He is the former president of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology and author of The Curse of the Self: Self-awareness, Egotism, and the Quality of Human Life.

Click on the citation to read the original post:

Leary, M. (2021, November 3) What does intellectual humility look like? Greater Good Magazine. Retrieved from https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/what_does_intellectual_humility_look_like

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Research Article

Intellectual humility is reliably associated with constructive responses to conflict

Roles Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Investigation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

* E-mail: [email protected]

Affiliation Department of Psychology, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States of America

Roles Conceptualization, Investigation, Supervision, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

Roles Conceptualization, Data curation, Investigation, Methodology, Writing – review & editing

Affiliation Constructive Dialogue Institute, New York, New York, United States of America

Roles Methodology, Writing – review & editing

Affiliation Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, New York, United States of America

• Jonah Koetke, 
• Karina Schumann, 
• Keith Welker, 
• Peter T. Coleman

• Published: September 6, 2024
• https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0309848
• Reader Comments

Conflict is a ubiquitous, but potentially destructive, feature of social life. In the current research, we argue that intellectual humility—the awareness of one’s intellectual fallibility—plays an important role in promoting constructive responses and decreasing destructive responses to conflict in different contexts. In Study 1, we examine the role of intellectual humility in interpersonal conflicts with friends and family members. In Study 2, we extend this finding to workplace conflicts. In both studies we find that intellectual humility predicts more constructive and less destructive responses to conflict. This work extends the burgeoning literature on the benefits of intellectual humility by demonstrating its association with responses that help defuse conflictual encounters.

Citation: Koetke J, Schumann K, Welker K, Coleman PT (2024) Intellectual humility is reliably associated with constructive responses to conflict. PLoS ONE 19(9): e0309848. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0309848

Editor: Taro Matsuki, Hiroshima International University: Hiroshima Kokusai Daigaku, JAPAN

Received: February 15, 2024; Accepted: August 19, 2024; Published: September 6, 2024

Copyright: © 2024 Koetke et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Data Availability: Full materials, data, and code for all studies are available at https://osf.io/sjh97/?view_only=1ec9acad7dd043fe8a5a7f0324aad5ab .

Funding: This work was supported by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation (61410). The first and second authors’ effort on this manuscript was also supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (BCS1917920). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Introduction

“In the course of my life, I have often had to eat my words, and I must confess that I have always found it a wholesome diet.” –Winston Churchill

Whether it’s because of a misunderstanding, a betrayal, or an insult, we all frequently face conflict situations that have the capacity to fracture our personal and professional relationships. How we choose to engage with the other person during these conflicts determines whether they escalate into destructive events or de-escalate and potentially become opportunities for learning and relationship growth. In the current research, we examine how one individual difference factor, intellectual humility , predicts constructive responses to interpersonal conflict in different relationship contexts.

The outcomes of destructive conflict

Interpersonal conflict can be costly when managed ineffectively. When occurring with our close relationship partners, conflict is often experienced as physically and psychologically stressful. For example, persistent marital conflict is associated with chronic health issues (e.g., high blood pressure) and reduced immune functioning [ 1 ]. Conflict and hostility can also lead to divorce and separation [ 2 ]. When married couples have children, their negative conflict patterns or the dissolution of their relationship can disrupt their children’s academic, psychological, physical, and social wellbeing [ 3 – 5 ]. Beyond romantic relationships, conflict is also one of the strongest predictors of friendship dissolution [ 6 ].

Interpersonal workplace conflict can also have deleterious consequences. Conflict with coworkers is associated with lower workplace satisfaction and organizational commitment, as well as higher intention to turnover [ 7 ], costing organizations millions of dollars annually [e.g., 8 ]. Workplace conflict can also spiral into more extreme incivility [ 9 ] and acts of revenge [ 10 ]. In the most extreme cases, workplace conflict can even escalate into outright aggression [ 11 ]. A recent poll found that even in remote work environments, 80% of respondents had experienced workplace conflict, including 67% who reported being aggressively cursed at by a colleague [ 12 ].

Thus, across different relationship contexts, conflict can have powerful destructive outcomes. It is therefore paramount to understand factors that support constructive responses aimed at defusing these conflicts and promoting more harmonious social functioning.

The benefits of constructive conflict

Despite the challenges and costs associated with conflict, these encounters need not be destructive [ 13 ]. When people engage in collaboration, problem-solving, and open-minded, non-hostile communication, conflict can be less damaging and can even have productive outcomes [ 14 – 16 ]. For example, actively collaborating to resolve relationship conflict is associated with positive feelings between relationship partners as well as short- and long-term benefits to the relationship [ 17 ]. In the workplace, minority dissent in teams can lead to more innovation [ 18 ], especially when that disagreement is paired with openness and a safe climate [ 19 ]. This raises the question: how can we minimize the costs of destructive conflict and encourage more constructive cognitions and behaviors? We propose that intellectual humility is one solution.

Intellectual humility in conflict

Intellectual humility (IH) has been growing as an area of research over the last decade [ 20 ]. While researchers vary in how they define IH, most agree that a central feature is an awareness of one’s intellectual fallibility [ 20 – 22 ]. IH is generally considered a trait [ 20 ], though it can also vary across situations [ 23 ].

Research provides emerging support for the possibility that IH plays an important role in driving constructive conflict management. During interpersonal conflict, people tend to adopt a narrow perspective that focuses on their own experience rather than the other person’s experience [ 24 , 25 ]. This limited perspective often leads to misattributions, blaming, and conflict escalation [ 24 ]. Because people with high IH acknowledge that their viewpoint is limited and potentially flawed, they tend to be motivated to seek out other perspectives and to favor a more nuanced view of the conflict at hand [ 26 – 28 ]. In support of this argument, people with higher IH are dispositionally more openminded [ 29 ], are more likely to empathize with others during a disagreement [ 30 ], and are more likely to offer comprehensive apologies when they have harmed someone, at least in part because they feel more empathy for the victim [ 31 ].

Despite the growth in literature on IH and correlates of constructive conflict behavior (e.g., empathy, apologies, etc.), little work has examined if IH predicts how we behave and think in conflict. The existing work on this mostly comes from research on wise reasoning—a construct containing IH, appreciation for contexts, sensitivity to changes in the relationship, and searching for compromise [ 32 – 34 ]. Researchers in this area have found that wise reasoning predicts cooperation in economic game tasks [ 35 ] and feelings of positivity about interpersonal conflicts [ 36 ]. According to this framework, IH might be associated with more constructive conflict responses (e.g., compromise) because they are part of the same overarching construct of wise reasoning [ 35 ]. In the current research we hope to replicate and extend these findings by examining if IH predicts specific strategies during conflicts in different domains.

The current research

The potential for IH to promote more constructive responses to conflict is an exciting advance that may point to a fulcrum for future intervention. In the current research, we replicate and extend previous findings on IH in the domain of interpersonal conflict to provide more robust evidence for this possibility. To do this, we examine data from Perspectives, a program developed by the Constructive Dialogue Institute—a nonprofit organization that offers online training programs to reduce ideological intolerance. Both samples include data from pre-surveys completed prior to the content of the Perspectives program. Data was derived from a larger set of studies, portions of which are reported by Welker and colleagues [ 37 ] in a paper examining whether the Perspectives program causes improvements in IH, affective polarization, and conflict resolution. After participants signed up, they were taken to a short online survey containing demographic items and measures of outcomes the Perspectives program was expected to impact. Although Welker and colleagues briefly reported simple bivariate correlations between the General IH scale and the conflict responses subscales for both studies reported here, we expand on this finding in this paper because 1) examining this relationship in depth was not the goal of the Welker et al. paper and several aspects of this relationship were not explored in that paper, analytically or theoretically, 2) it is critical to understand the behavioral correlates of IH in depth and the goal of this paper is to unpack that relationship, and 3) we are conducting more sophisticated analyses, such as multilevel modeling with random intercepts, and this will lead to a better understanding of the relationship between IH and conflict resolution than previously offered.

Our first study tested the role of IH in conflicts with friends and family members. We replicated and also extended this in Study 2 with a workplace sample to test the role of IH in workplace conflicts. In these studies, participants thought of specific people with whom they have conflict and reported on their behaviors and emotions in the context of these disagreements. Across both studies we find support for IH as a predictor of constructive conflict responses.

In this research, we used two different IH scales. The first is the General Intellectual Humility Scale (GIHS; [ 22 ]), which is a unidimensional scale focused on seeing one’s views and beliefs as fallible. It therefore only assesses one’s internal recognition of fallibility. The second is the Comprehensive Intellectual Humility Scale (CIHS; [ 38 ]), which is a multidimensional scale that includes four subscales: independence of intellect and ego, openness to revising one’s views, respect for others’ viewpoints, and lack of intellectual overconfidence. CIHS therefore assesses both internal aspects of IH, as well as more relational and other-focused manifestations of IH. While the GIHS and CIHS are typically correlated with each other, they are thought to capture different aspects and conceptualizations of IH. We therefore included both scales to provide more evidence and nuance to the correlations of IH in this domain. It is common to keep these scales separate when including both in a study [e.g., 39 ]. We did not have a priori expectations about how these scales might differ, but did test for differences between each scale’s predictive ability.

We hypothesized that IH would be associated with more constructive and less destructive conflict styles in all contexts. Because these are secondary data analyses, there were several measures assessed in each study that were unrelated to the current research question or measured in only part of the study sample. For concision, we report only the main variables of interest below. These studies were not preregistered. Full materials, data, and code for all studies are available at https://osf.io/sjh97/?view_only=1ec9acad7dd043fe8a5a7f0324aad5ab .

In Study 1, we tested the role of IH in conflicts with friends and family members. We hypothesized that IH would be associated with more constructive and less destructive conflict strategies.

Participants.

In Study 1, we analyzed the pre-survey data from a Perspectives higher education randomized control trial. Data collection occurred between August 23, 2021 and May 2, 2022. Participants were recruited from ten classes within three higher education institutions (one large Southern university, one large Eastern university, and one small Western community college). All participants completed an online consent form and this study was approved by the IRBs at University of North Texas, Crafton Hills College, and the University of Maryland. The total sample included 775 participants. We removed those who did not complete the survey ( n = 66), and then those who failed the attention check ( n = 69). This left a final sample of 640 participants ( M age = 21.05, SD age = 3.54; Female = 326, Male = 135, non-binary = 17, chose to self-describe = 3, did not report = 159; African American/Black = 58, East or Southeast Asian = 35, Hispanic/Latino = 76, Middle Eastern/North African = 4, South Asian = 17, White/Caucasian = 226, indicated more than one racial identity = 61, Other = 1, Prefer not to say = 2, did not report = 160). A sensitivity analysis in G Power [ 40 ] revealed that the study was powered to detect small-medium correlations ( ρ = .14, 95% power, α = .05).

Materials and procedure.

Intellectual humility . Participants completed the six-item GIHS (e.g., “I accept that my beliefs and attitudes may be wrong”) on a scale from 1 ( Not at all like me ) to 5 ( Very much like me ; α = .85). Participants also completed the 22-item CIHS (e.g., I’m willing to change my mind once it’s made up about an important topic”) on a scale from 1 ( Strongly disagree ) to 5 ( Strongly agree ; α = .81).

Conflict responses . Participants then completed items assessing their behaviors during conflict [ 41 ]. Participants thought of a friend or family member with whom they have conflict. They then reported on the behavior and communication skills they usually employ, divided into whether these behaviors and constructive/positive or destructive/negative. They completed items assessing subscales of positive informing ( α = .61; three items, e.g., “When in conflict with PERSON, I openly discuss what is important to me so that others can understand me.”), positive evading ( α = .57; three items, e.g., “When in conflict with PERSON, I suggest that a problem be discussed at a later time to give people more time to consider various alternatives.”), positive opening ( α = .85; six items, e.g., “When in conflict with PERSON, I try to find out about what is most important on the other side before suggesting possible solutions.”), positive uniting ( α = .87; seven items, e.g., “When in conflict with PERSON, I when possible, treat the problem as one that can be solved by working together.”), negative attacking ( α = .84; eight items, e.g., “When in conflict with PERSON, I speak in a disrespectful manner.”) and negative evading ( α = .69; four items, e.g., “When in conflict with PERSON, I remain silent or change the subject because I am uncomfortable with open conflict.”) on a scale from 1 ( Never ) to 7 ( Always ). Because of a substantial amount of overlap between subscales, we created overall composites of positive behaviors ( α = .91) and negative behaviors ( α = .77) as our primary outcomes (see Table 1 for correlations across subscales).

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0309848.t001

Brief socially desirability scale . To ensure that the associations in this study were not due to socially desirable responding, participants also completed a five-item measure of social desirability [ 42 ]. This measure asks participants questions with an unlikely, but socially desirable response (e.g., “Do you always practice what you preach?") Participants answered each question with answer options of yes, no, or prefer not to say. We coded socially desirable answers as 1, socially undesirable answers as 0, and excluded participants who indicated they would prefer not to respond. We then averaged across the five items to create a composite score ( α = .44).

Data analyses

To account for data clustering, we ran multi-level models using lme4 [ 43 ] and lmerTest [ 44 ] in R version 4.2.2 [ 45 ]. We first included random intercepts for both higher education institution ( N institution = 3) and class ( N class = 10), however this often resulted in singular fit. Because even small ICCs can lead to biased results [ 46 ], we included random intercepts for class whenever the ICC was above 0 (see S2 Table in S1 File ).

To test for differences between the GIHS and CIHS, we computed fisher z scores [ 47 ].

We regressed positive and negative conflict responses on each IH scale (see Table 2 ). Both GIHS and CIHS predicted more positive behaviors and fewer negative behaviors. The effect sizes for both scales ranged from small to medium [ 48 ]. We retested both models controlling for age and gender. The association between GIHS and the negative composite fell to just below significance ( p = .057; see SM).

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0309848.t002

Fisher z scores revealed that CIHS had a significantly stronger correlation with the negative composite than did GIHS, z = 3.09, p = .002. The associations with the positive composite did not differ between scales.

Finally, to ensure that these results were not due to socially desirable responding, we retested both models controlling for the brief social desirability scale. Again, the association between GIHS and the negative composite fell to just below significance ( p = .065; see SM for full results).

Both IH scales predicted more productive conflict behaviors and strategies. Interestingly, CIHS appeared to be a better predictor of the negative composite than the GIHS. This may indicate that the GIHS and CIHS predict positive responses to interpersonal conflicts in similar ways, but that CIHS maps on more strongly to negative conflict responses. We tested whether this pattern replicated in Study 2.

In Study 1, we showed benefits of IH for more constructive responding to interpersonal conflicts with family and friends. In Study 2, we aimed to replicate the effects of Study 1, while also extending into the domain of workplace conflict. To do so, we examined the relationship between IH and constructive responses to workplace conflict among members of government finance organizations. Study 2 used a pre-survey from a second randomized control trial with a new sample.

The total sample included 277 participants who were all members of the Government Finance Officers Organization and worked for local governments in the United States. Data collection occurred between August 16, 2021 and October 18, 2021. This study was determined as exempt from requiring consent by Sterling IRB. Participants were provided with information prior to participating, including an overview of the study procedure and time commitment, the privacy policy, and contact information if they had any questions. We used this sample from the workforce because it allowed us to focus on conflict between coworkers. We removed those who did not complete the survey ( n = 8). This left a final sample of 269 participants ( M age = 49.79, SD age = 9.62; Female = 190, Male = 69, “prefer not to say” = 2, did not report = 8; African American/Black = 9, East or Southeast Asian = 7, Hispanic/Latino = 10, South Asian = 1, White/Caucasian = 198, indicated more than one racial identity = 7, Other = 2, “Prefer not to say” = 4, did not report = 31). Most participants identified as executives or department heads ( n = 138), with others identifying as middle managers ( n = 57), staff ( n = 36), or elected officials ( n = 7; failed to report = 31). A sensitivity analysis revealed that the study was powered to detect small-medium correlations ( ρ full sample = .22, 95% power, α = .05).

Materials and procedure . Participants completed the same measures as in Study 1, including full versions of the GIHS ( α = .83) and CIHS ( α = .84), and conflict responses while thinking about conflicts with a family member or friend ( α positive composite = .91; α negative composite = .84; see Table 3 for correlations across subscales). In addition, they completed conflict responses while thinking about conflicts with a work supervisor and supervisee ( α positive composite = .95; α negative composite = .90).

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0309848.t003

To account for data clustering, we included random intercepts for department area whenever the ICC was above 0 (see S8 Table in S1 File ).

We regressed each family/friend conflict composite on each IH scale (see Table 4 ). Replicating Study 1, both GIHS and CIHS predicted more positive behaviors and fewer negative behaviors in the friend/family conflicts. We then regressed workplace conflict behaviors on each IH scale. Both GIHS and CIHS predicted more positive behaviors in the workplace conflict. Although GIHS was associated in the expected direction, only CIHS significantly predicted fewer negative behaviors. We retested all models controlling for age and gender. All significant associations remained significant.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0309848.t004

Fisher z scores revealed that CIHS had a significantly stronger correlation with the workplace negative composite ( z = 3.49, p < .001) than did GIHS. All other correlations were statistically similar.

Both IH scales predicted more constructive and less destructive behaviors during conflicts with family, friends, and coworkers. GIHS was significantly associated with more positive behaviors in both contexts, and fewer negative behaviors in conflicts with family and friends. CIHS was significantly associated with more positive behaviors and fewer negative behaviors in both contexts. Combined with Study 1, these results suggest that IH is an important predictor of conflict responses in conflicts with family, friends, and coworkers, but suggest that the CIHS might be a more reliable predictor of negative conflict behaviors than the GIHS.

General discussion

Conflicts are a normal and common part of life. Left unresolved, however, even small conflicts can escalate and have harmful consequences for the parties involved. It is therefore critical that we understand how to promote more constructive responses to the conflicts we typically encounter, such as interpersonal and workplace disagreements. Across two studies, we found that people with high IH were more likely to engage in constructive conflict strategies and less likely to engage in destructive conflict strategies. We found support for associations with IH across conflicts with family and friends (Studies 1 and 2) and workplace colleagues (Study 2).

Although the current research replicates and extends the existing work in important ways, it has several limitations. First, all our findings were self-reported. Although self-reports and hypothetical scenarios are both limited by their reflected rather than behavioral nature, prior work on IH shows similar patterns of associations when using both self-reported vignette and behavioral paradigms [e.g., 49 , 50 ]. We therefore have confidence that the self-reported tendencies of high IH people mostly translate to real behavior. Nevertheless, future research should investigate whether IH predicts real behavior during conflict interactions. Second, all our findings are limited by their correlational nature. While most research on IH relies on correlational evidence, future work might leverage newly developed manipulations that temporarily boost IH [ 51 , 52 ] to conduct experimental replications. Third, our samples and results can only speak to the United States context and people participating through the Constructive Dialogue Institute programming. It is therefore possible that some participants selected into the Constructive Dialogue Institute Programming precisely because they feel strongly about discussing across differences. This seems unlikely to have made a difference in the results, however, because a large proportion of the academic samples participated in the programming as part of their classes as opposed to participating of their own interest. Nevertheless, future work should seek to replicate these results in other countries and with other samples.

Despite these limitations, the current research finds evidence for the association between IH and conflict responses across different conflict contexts. Future work might examine whether intervening at the level of people’s IH promotes enduring improvements to how people engage with their conflict partners. Future work could also build on this by examining the impacts of perceived IH during conflict. In a practical sense, perceiving IH in another party might signal that they are willing to listen and collaborate. This might encourage collaborative behaviors and IH from the perceiver. In line with this possibility, perceptions of conversational receptiveness—a construct theoretically similar to IH—increases collaboration [ 53 ] and reciprocal levels of receptiveness in the listener [ 54 ]. IH may prove to be similarly contagious during conflicts. Finally, future research might investigate if and when IH could backfire during conflict. For example, could someone with high IH see a low IH counterpart as unworthy of collaboration [e.g., 55 ]? Could someone with high IH be seen as deferential and be taken advantage of during conflict? In a time of polarization and intense ideological and personal conflict, it is important to understand when IH is beneficial and when it might not be.

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What Is Intellectual Humility?

Almost all of us are far more confident in ourselves than we probably should be. If we humbly admit this, does it improve how we deal with conflict?

JSTOR Daily features editor Sara Ivry speaks with Mark Leary, professor emeritus at Duke University about the concept of intellectual humility.

Sara Ivry : Hi, everybody. I’m Sara Ivry. I’m the features editor at JSTOR Daily, and I’m happy to be part of the team, bringing you a special series of conversations on the topic of intellectual humility. Today, I’m speaking with Mark Leary . He is an emeritus professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke. And Mark has done a lot of research on the topic of intellectual humility. So I’m going to let him explain what that is. Mark Leary, welcome.

Mark Leary : Thank you.

Ivry : Tell us, what is intellectual humility and how do you define it?

Leary : Well, in a sentence, intellectual humility is simply recognizing that something that you believe might, in fact, be wrong . Of course, it never feels like it’s wrong. We wouldn’t believe things that feel wrong, but an intellectually humble person recognizes that many of the things they confidently believe might, in fact, be inaccurate.

Ivry : How did this turn into an area of academic inquiry?

Leary : Well, philosophers have been talking about this as an intellectual virtue for a long time, that people should recognize the possibility that they might be wrong about things. But then in the last twenty years or so , behavioral researchers, psychologists and others became interested in the overconfidence phenomenon. This is the fact that almost all of us are far more confident in ourselves than we probably should be. Most people think that they are better than average on most dimensions, which of course is impossible. And we just go through life believing that we’re on the side of the truth most of the time. And about ten years ago, the John Templeton Foundation became interested in this topic and began to ask the question, Well, what would it mean if we could get people to be a little more intellectually humble? If we get people to realize that their confidence and what they believe—in their attitudes and their viewpoints—is sometimes misplaced, would it improve their decisions and would it improve how they deal with disagreements and conflicts with other people? So it was really just the right time and the right place to begin to ask the question: What can we do to sort of make people more realistic in the accuracy of their views?

Ivry : Mm hmm. Tell me, is intellectual humility a way of being that you can cultivate? Or is it a personality trait that some people may have and some people just don’t have it?

Leary : Well, certainly people differ in the degree to which they tend to be intellectually humble, and that’s probably due to some genetic factors in terms of people’s tolerance of uncertainty. It’s hard to be intellectually humble and admit you may not know things if you want certainty all the time. But it’s also has a lot to do with how people were raised. Did your parents require you to sort of defend the things you were saying? So where’d you get that? Where’s that information from? So it is both a personality characteristic, but also a state of mind that just emerges some of the time. Can we cultivate it? That’s the big question. People are beginning to study—can we develop ways to make people more intellectually humble?

Ivry : Are there certain variables that help determine whether somebody will be intellectually humble or not intellectually humble? I mean, whether it’s gender or education level or, you know, favorite ice cream flavor, what have you? What are those parameters, such as they may be.

Leary : The ones that have been studied the most are personality characteristics. So, for example, we know that people who enjoy thinking more tend to be higher in intellectual humility. Some people just like thinking more. They like playing intellectual games, and they like the trivia contests in newspapers and things like that. They like pondering issues that don’t have any answers. Other people don’t like thinking unless they really have to. This, oh, why are you wasting your time just pondering all this stuff for? The more you enjoy thinking, the more likely you are to be intellectually humble. So that’s one thing that helps to contribute. Another is what I mentioned earlier—a tolerance for ambiguity or uncertainty. None of us like uncertainty. When we believe something, we want to be certain: are we right or we wrong? But some people tolerate that uncertainty better than others. And if you tolerate uncertainty better, it’s easier to be intellectually humble because you can hold your beliefs and you can hold them firmly while still saying to yourself, “Yeah, but I can’t be completely sure that I’m right about this.” So there are some psychological dispositions that make it easier or harder to be high in intellectual humility.

This won’t surprise your female audience, but a lot of studies show that men are slightly less intellectually humble than women in terms of being certain in what they believe. You ask about education. That’s an interesting one. There’s only one study I know about, and it hasn’t been published, so I don’t want to put too much credibility on it, that suggests that education has two effects on intellectual humility. The more you learn and the more schooling you have, the more intellectually humble you tend to be, in the sense that you begin to recognize all of this information out there that you don’t have a clue about. So it increases intellectual humility in general. But education decreases intellectual humility in the areas in which you are an expert or specialist, which makes a little bit of sense. It makes a little sense that an expert ought to be more confident of their beliefs than someone who’s not. So it increases general intellectual humility, but decreases intellectual humility when it comes to your own areas of expertise and specialization.

Ivry : So how do you cultivate intellectual humility, if you want to do that?

Leary : A couple of thing I think help. One is simply recognizing that I can be wrong. Wouldn’t it be odd if I was always right about everything? We did a study where we asked American adults to think of all of the situations in which they disagree with other people. Think of every disagreement you’ve had in the last two weeks: over really trivial things, really stupid things, or maybe really serious existential issues. And what percentage of those disagreements do you think you were the one who was correct? The average person thinks they were correct more than two-thirds of the time, which can’t be. It just can’t. So once you begin to realize that we all have a tendency, it’s part of human nature, there’s nothing wrong with this. I’m not pointing fingers. I’m the same way. Once we realize we all have this tendency to overestimate how correct we are, then you can begin to try to check yourself when you feel like you’re completely right and other people are saying, “No, I don’t think so. I disagree.” I think you got your facts wrong–to be a little bit more humble, to say, well, may maybe I am wrong doesn’t mean you just cave in and say, “Okay, I give up, I’m wrong.” But it means that you hold your beliefs a little less confidently, and you go looking for more reasons. The other thing has been shown is that you can increase intellectual humility in people through role modeling. For example, in school classes, teachers, who openly confess when students ask questions, you know, “I don’t know.” Or they give an answer and say, “But, you know, I could be wrong about that. I haven’t really looked at this deeply”—begins to role model that it’s absolutely okay that I don’t completely understand and I don’t know about you, I’d love to see a politician someday, just once, when asked a question say, “I don’t know,” instead of giving an answer.

Ivry : Right. It’s so interesting because in politics, when we see people reverse course, they’re tarnished as wishy washy, and it’s seen as a deficit.

Leary : Yes. Yeah, that’s right. But when you stop and think about that, it seems odd. And there is some new research in organizational psychology showing that managers, CEOs, leaders who are higher in intellectual humility, are actually more respected by the people that they manage. The manager who says, “Hey, you guys, I think we should do this, now there’s chance I’m wrong about this, so let’s talk about it.” Now there are times you can’t do that. You know, if you’re if you’re the general in the army leading an army into battle, “I think we’re going to go win this. Although I might be wrong about that. We might get wiped out.” You can’t do that. There’s times you can’t express it. But that’s just a difference not in true intellectual humility, but what are the conditions under which you should show it? And I think it’s important for people to understand the distinction. It’s one thing in your mind to say, “I could be wrong about this,” and there are times to say that and be honest about it. And if other times maybe not to be intellectually humble publicly, that it’s not the right thing to do is like in a battle. But my own belief is that teaching everybody that it’s okay to consider the possibility you’re wrong and admit you’re wrong–and that’s in fact a sign of maturity and intelligence instead of weakness, I think is a really good thing.

Ivry : Tell me, what’s the difference between open mindedness and intellectual humility?

Leary: I think they’re very closely related. Intellectual humility involves beliefs you already have and entertaining the possibility that you may be incorrect. You can be open minded about things that you had never thought about before, and you’re hearing it for the first time and you’re willing to accept it and you listen to it and say, “Well, that’s really interesting.” There’s no humility involved because it’s not that you were somehow believing that you were correct about it in some other way, and now you’re considering the possibility you might be wrong.

Ivry : What about the difference between the general concept of humility and the category of intellectual humility? How do those relate to one another?

Leary : That’s a great question. Those two concepts are both a bit of a mess in the research literature. It depends on who you talk to, how those are defined. I am not sure that intellectual humility is really a subtype of general humility. What general humility is, when we say somebody’s being humble, it’s not somebody who’s denigrating their performance or their ability or their accomplishments. A humble person knows exactly how good they are. They’re willing to admit it, but they don’t expect special treatment. Just because you happen to come from a great family or you have had a great career or you’re a famous actor or you did some great thing, you say, “Sure, I did. Yeah. I’m an outstanding athlete (if that’s accurate). But what’s the big deal? You know, you don’t have to treat me differently. I’m just a normal person like you on every other dimension. I’m as messed up as you are. Yeah, I just happen to be a famous actor or a great athlete” or whatever it happens to be. That’s not quite what intellectual humility is. The thing we call intellectual humility is just simply this recognition that I could be wrong about something.

Ivry : What about the opposite? Like, if you have too much intellectual humility and you’re so suggestible, any time somebody says to you, well, you know you’re wrong on this or you’re wrong on that, and then it sort of seems like it would be paralyzing in just the everyday living of life.

Leary : Absolutely. And I’ve had a lot of people say, I don’t want to be intellectually humble because that means I’m going to be a pushover. I’m going to be wishy-washy. I won’t take a stand on things. In the research, we don’t find that. And I think the reason is that intellectual humility is based on three things. I mean, why is it that I could be wrong about something? One is that I simply don’t have all of the information that I need. The second possibility is that I have plenty of information, but that information may be biased in ways that I don’t appreciate. And the third is that maybe I don’t have the background or ability to really understand all of the evidence that’s involved. There’s a lot of things we believe, we believe that some expert told us, and not because we really figured it out. So what happens, I think, with intellectually humble people is when they think to themselves, I could be wrong about this. They go on a search for the validity of the information that supports the belief. They want to know, do I have all the information? Is that information biased? Do I have the ability to understand that information? It’s a very logical and rational assessment of the validity of the belief. It’s just not caving in because somebody else says that you’re wrong. And in fact, you can be completely intellectually humble and almost never cave in to people. I recognize that I could be wrong, but in this particular topic, you know, I don’t think I am. All the evidence points in my direction. It’s just continuing to consider the possibility that you might be incorrect.

Ivry : Mark, I’m curious what drew you to this concept to investigate it in your work. What compels you about intellectual humility?

Leary : Well, really two things, one personal and one more professional. And the personal experience I had was back when I was a senior in college. We were reading a book in a class by Carlos Castaneda. I think it was Tales of Power . Carlos Castaneda was a UCLA anthropology graduate student who was studying with a Mexican shaman. He was trying to understand shamanism and all the things that shamen in a tribe do for their community. And there’s one point in the book where the shaman is trying to convince Carlos Castaneda that Carlos’s views of the world—all of our views of the world are sort of socially constructed, that we think the world is the way it is, because that’s what we’ve been taught and it isn’t necessarily true. And as an example, he asked Carlos, they’re in this Mexican marketplace and there’s hundreds of people, and the shaman asked, “Carlos, what makes you believe that every person in this crowd is a human being?” Now. I came up short with that. I thought, “What, what, what the heck? Of course, these people are all human beings. What else would they be?” And the shaman’s point was, wasn’t that they might be something else, that they were aliens or shape shifters or automatons or something. His point was, “Do you really have evidence that every person in this crowd is a human being?” And I realized that I didn’t. And before your listeners think I’ve lost my mind, it’s not that I think the people in a crowd are not human beings. But if you say, “Do you really have evidence? Do you know for sure?” I’d have to say, “No, I haven’t tested the DNA of all of these people in this crowd to find out.”

And so I realized I couldn’t say for sure with absolute confidence that all of the people in that crowd were human beings. And that made me begin to realize that I was simply clinging to an awful lot of ideas, somewhat blindly without considering their merits. And again, I didn’t change my mind. If you’d have said a day after that, “Do you think most of these people are human beings?” I go, Yeah, “I think they’re all human beings.” But if they say, “Are you absolutely certain?” I’d say, “Well, no, how could I possibly be absolutely certain?” So that really—it shook me. It was one of those moments that sort of changed my view of my own beliefs about the world. So then speed ahead twenty or thirty years. A lot of the topics I was interested in, in my own research had to do with people’s biases, particularly biases about themselves, their overconfidence, and believing they were better than they were. So in some ways, intellectual arrogance, low intellectual humility is one of those biases that characterize every single one of us. No matter how hard we try, we are more certain about things than we should be. So combining that personal experience with this interest in biases, when the topic of intellectual humility came up, it just it really, really suited me as something that I wanted to study.

Ivry : Mark, in the scope of your work in intellectual humility, what is one of the things that you’ve worked on, one of the projects that you know is most meaningful to you? Your favorite?

Leary : The one that I got the biggest kick out of that people seem to find interesting, it’s not published yet—we’re still working on getting it written up–had to do with the role of intellectual humility in close romantic relationships. In other words, what’s it like to be in a relationship with sort of a low, intellectually humble know-it-all, compared to a relatively intellectually humble person? And I got the idea for this study, I was standing at a Hallmark gift shop, and there was a little placard, a little card there for sale, a picture of a woman. And she’s going, “I married Mr. Right. I just didn’t know that his first name was Always.” And the little light bulb went off and said, “Okay, what’s it like? What’s it like to be in a relationship with Mr. or Ms. Always Right?” So we brought in several dozen romantic couples. They ranged in age from their twenties to their sixties, brought in both members of the couple, and we separated them, gave them both a measure of intellectual humility, and then had them answer questions about each other and about the relationship. And what we found was that the woman’s level of intellectual humility didn’t make that much of a difference to the quality of the relationship. But the man’s did. Women who were in relationships with men who were low in intellectual humility were much less satisfied with their relationships. They said they argued more. They didn’t have as much respect for him, and he was also less satisfied. Low, intellectually humble men in relationships were less satisfied than more intellectually humble men. And it was an interesting gender difference. It’s as if in a relationship, low intellectually humble men exhibit a particularly toxic way of dealing with conflicts and disagreements. We asked them about the ways that they argued and did they slam doors and yell and that kind of thing. And the low, intellectually humble men tended to do that kind of thing more. So this needs to be pursued in greater detail, but it’s clear that it’s awfully hard to live with someone who every time you guys have a disagreement, that person thinks he or potentially she is the one that’s right as opposed to being more intellectually humble about your disagreements, about beliefs and decisions and that sort of thing.

Ivry : That is fascinating. I look forward to reading that research when it comes out. How would you like to see the concept of intellectual humility play out in the world?

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Leary : I think if people could begin to have disagreements and conflicts and agree to disagree, we use that phrase a lot, but we really don’t agree to disagree. We say that we still really disagree and we’re angry about it. To be able to have conversations that are more civil and agreeable disagreements because we each recognize that as firmly as I believe this thing I believe, “I might be the one that’s wrong. I don’t think I am. So I’m going to disagree with you.” And maybe we won’t be able to even compromise on this issue. But that’s different than us hating each other because the other person is not only wrong, but may be evil for believing this thing when in fact maybe, no, maybe you’re the one that’s wrong and maybe we’re both completely dead wrong about this thing. Or that’s the other thing I often think in ideological disagreements, you know who’s right? Me or you? Well, you know. We might both be completely wrong. And we’re arguing about this, so there’s plenty of room for disagreement. We’ve got to disagree in order to come to an understanding of how do we negotiate and compromise and find a common path forward. But that’s going to be a lot easier if we have people who are more intellectually humble.

Ivry : Mark, thank you so much. This has really been so fascinating and a great pleasure to speak with you.

Leary : It’s been great being here.

Ivry : We’ve been talking with Mark Leary, a retired professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University in North Carolina. This conversation kicks off a series on intellectual humility and the issues and challenges that arise when it’s applied in different niche communities, like a religious congregation or a bar. Each conversation will feature a pairing between a scholar of intellectual humility and a member of that particular niche community. There’s a lot to think about with these conversations. We hope you enjoy them. We hope you share them, and we hope you talk about them. We also have a reading list about intellectual humility for your pleasure to enjoy and engage with. This conversation is the first in a mini series. JSTOR Daily is presenting on the topic. Funding for these conversations on intellectual humility comes from UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center as part of its “Expanding Awareness of the Science of Intellectual Humility” initiative. It’s supported by the John Templeton Foundation. We thank them both. Also, thanks to Cathy Halley, JSTOR Daily’s editor-in-chief, and to Julie Subrin, who helped us produce this series. And finally, a shout out to you, dear listeners, for spending your time with us.

Listen to the rest of the “Conversations on Intellectual Humility” series on the JSTOR Daily website , or wherever you get your favorite podcasts .

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Intellectual Humility Fuels Inner Strength, Critical Thinking & Success

Humility is a powerful virtue, which has become misunderstood.  Humility is a noun and is defined as a modest opinion or estimate of one’s own importance.

As a society, we seem to over-index on the “modest opinion” portion of the definition, which has led to the belief that humility is insecurity about our abilities.  In reality, the key part of the definition is “one’s own importance.”  When we shift our attention to this part of the definition, we understand humility to mean:

To be no more important than others and no less important than others.

Simply put, humility is about mutual respect, for ourselves and others.

Humility enables us to tame our ego.

Humility is one of the most important and necessary factors to job and career success because it empowers us to change our minds, and more importantly, knowing when we should.  This cognitive process is known as intellectual humility .

Intellectual humility powers far-reaching benefits, including in-depth thinking, higher-quality problem-solving and decision making, and creative, innovative ideation.

Intellectual humility is a mindset that frees our thinking because it removes the burden of needing to be right.  Intellectually humble individuals are curious and want to get all of the facts on a topic, to come to a well-informed opinion or decision.

In more psychological terms, intellectual humility is a non-threatening awareness of our intellectual weakness or shortcomings.  It is the ability to recognize we could be wrong.

Intellectual humility guides the way we think or consider facts, information, and the opinions of others.  It is an open-minded approach, powered by a desire to learn. Intellectually humble individuals see life as school, and they welcome new ideas, advice, and feedback on how to improve.

It enables us to objectively evaluate information, which may differ from our current opinions or views, and avoid forming incorrect beliefs that are not supported by facts. Intellectual humble individuals do not dismiss an idea base on who is presenting the information. They think deeper, with a desire to understand the facts.

In 2016 Pepperdine University professors, Drs. Liz Mancuso and Stephen Rouse identified 4-interrelated components of intellectual humility :

• Respecting other viewpoints: Being open to ideas that are counter to our own and actively trying to understand those ideas or perspectives.
• Not being intellectually overconfident: Recognizing that although we are smart, we may not always be right.
• Separating ego (self-worth) from intellect: Attempting to separate our ideas from our identity so that we do not feel personally attacked or disrespected when someone disagrees with our perspectives. Separating our intelligence from our ego helps to open our thinking to consider the points of view, opinions, and ideas of others.
• Willing to revise or change our opinions: Actively considers new facts and how they might change our opinions as we learn.

It is possible to possess some of these components and not others.  But complete intellectual humility includes a high degree of each.

Humility can be one of the hardest traits to develop because it starts from a recognition that we are not always right, which is especially hard in a world where being right is rewarded.

As C.S. Lewis said, humility is not thinking less of yourself; it is thinking about yourself less.

To learn more about humility and other career success skills, subscribe to the Brize Newsletter.

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Intellectual Humility

Introduction, general background: humility and intellectual virtue.

• Philosophical Concepts of Intellectual Humility
• Psychological Research on Intellectual Humility
• Research on the Applications of Intellectual Humility

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Intellectual Humility by Casey Johnson , Hanna Gunn , Michael P. Lynch , Nathan Sheff LAST REVIEWED: 27 June 2017 LAST MODIFIED: 27 June 2017 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780195396577-0347

Intellectual humility is a concept in progress—philosophers and psychologists are in the process of defining and coming to understand what intellectual humility is and what place it has in our theories. Most accounts of intellectual humility build from work in virtue epistemology, the study of knowledge as the state that results when agents are epistemically virtuous (or, perhaps, the view that the proper object of study for epistemology is the intellectually virtuous agent). This work, in turn, builds on the long tradition of virtue ethics. Because of this etiology, one dominant approach has been to conceive of intellectual humility as a particularly epistemic way of being more generally humble. Much of the current philosophical literature on intellectual humility concerns how best to characterize or define the concept. One emerging disagreement between researchers working on intellectual humility concerns differing kinds of models of the concept. One camp takes intellectual humility to be a unique and unified trait—this is what we call monism about intellectual humility. The alternative theories take intellectual humility to be a collection of related traits. We call this pluralism about intellectual humility. There are, of course, disagreements within each of these camps, but being aware of this central difference between the kinds of views is helpful in understanding the current debates in the philosophical literature. In addition, there are ongoing attempts to understand intellectual humility in an empirically informed way. Empirical studies, by philosophers and psychologists, try to understand both the psychological dispositions that make a person intellectually humble, and what agents mean when they describe themselves or their peers as intellectually humble, intellectually diffident, or intellectually arrogant. This work both benefits from—and can help supplement—the more theoretical work being done in virtue epistemology. Even as work is done to attempt a precise understanding of the trait or traits that make a person intellectually humble, theorists and educators are applying the concept in various and fruitful ways. We are becoming increasingly aware of the ways in which our discourse is hampered by prejudice, dogmatism, and cognitive biases. One exciting hypothesis is that cultivating intellectual humility or even just being aware of the concept of intellectual humility might help agents to overcome these difficulties. If this is the case then intellectual humility may help us with a variety of educational goals, and also improve public and political discourse.

The work on intellectual humility is borne out of the observation that the progress philosophers have made in understanding virtues in the moral domain can be elucidating in the epistemic domain as well. Because of this, the notion of intellectual humility has its roots in humility more generally. As such, important background reading for exploration of intellectual humility deals with broader concepts such as virtue, epistemic virtue, and humility simpliciter. We provide some of that background reading in this section. With one exception, the articles in this section fall into two rough categories: general discussions of humility that have been influential for discussions of intellectual humility, and discussions of intellectual virtues, of which intellectual humility is one. In the first category, Driver 1989 and Snow 1995 are both influential and often cited (for examples see section on Philosophical Concepts of Intellectual Humility ). Driver’s paper offers an analysis of virtue generally, investigating whether virtues could ever be based on ignorance. Snow’s paper investigates different kinds of humility, and argues for the value of the virtue. A more recent discussion of humility is available in Garcia 2006 , which speaks to concerns raised in Driver’s paper. In the second category, Zagzebski 1996 offers an account of intellectual virtues according to which they are the subclass of moral virtues aimed at knowledge, while Code 1987 offers an account of responsibilist virtue epistemology. Further background and a contrast between reliabilist and responsibilist accounts of intellectual virtues are available in Battaly 2008 . Crisp 2010 offers additional discussion of virtue epistemology by relating it to Aristotelian virtue ethics. Brady and Pritchard 2003 is the introduction to a special issue on moral and epistemic virtues. The entire issue is useful, but the introduction, in particular, offers a clear explanation of the motivations for and history of virtue epistemology. Finally, Baehr 2011 is an overview of intellectual virtues, with some discussion of intellectual humility. The only exception is Heft, et al. 2011 , which uses the concept of intellectual humility in an explicitly religious context. This use of the concept is distinct from most of its contemporary philosophical uses, but can serve as a contrast for them.

Baehr, Jason. The Inquiring Mind: On Intellectual Virtues and Virtue Epistemology . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199604074.001.0001

Baehr advocates for a responsibilist form of virtue epistemology that prioritizes intellectual character virtues (e.g., open-mindedness, courage, etc.) over intellectual faculties (e.g., memory, perception, etc.). He proposes what he terms a “personal worth” account of intellectual virtue, which seems to tie into his endorsement of a weak autonomous view of intellectual virtue—one must conduct one’s intellectual endeavors with the right intentions.

Battaly, Heather. “Virtue Epistemology.” Philosophy Compass 3.4 (2008): 639–663.

DOI: 10.1111/j.1747-9991.2008.00146.x

Battaly gives a general introduction to virtue epistemology and its relation to mainstream analytic epistemology. She outlines the differences between the two main camps in virtue epistemology: virtue reliabilism and virtue responsibilism. For reliabilists, epistemic virtues are stable and reliable faculties or competences; responsibilists instead argue that epistemic virtues are character traits of excellent knowers. Battaly also discusses virtue-eliminativism and virtue-expansionism.

Brady, Michael S., and Duncan Pritchard. “Moral and Epistemic Virtues.” Metaphilosophy 34.1–2 (2003): 1–11.

DOI: 10.1111/1467-9973.00256

In this introduction to a special issue on the topic, Brady and Pritchard offer an explanation of the shift from virtue ethics to virtue epistemology as well as the appeal of each. This is a useful history for orienting to the literature. The authors then go on to describe the papers in the special issue, and provide a useful bibliography for virtue epistemology.

Code, Lorraine. Epistemic Responsibility . Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1987.

Code’s book is an early formulation of the responsibilist approach to virtue epistemology, wherein she develops her account of epistemic responsibility by examining cases of success and failure of such responsibility. This book should be of interest to those who want to consider intellectual humility through a responsibilist lens.

Crisp, Roger. “Virtue Ethics and Virtue Epistemology.” Metaphilosophy 41.1–2 (2010): 22–40.

DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9973.2009.01621.x

Crisp offers an interesting (and comprehensive) discussion of how one might construct virtue epistemology by using Aristotelian virtue ethics as a model to work from. He also suggests an explanation for why theorists are drawn to either responsibilist or reliabilist theories: those attracted to utility-maximizing accounts are likely to be reliabilists, while those who are drawn to virtue ethics are more likely to be responsibilists.

Driver, Julia. “The Virtues of Ignorance.” The Journal of Philosophy 86.7 (1989): 373–384.

DOI: 10.2307/2027146

Driver argues that some virtues are based on ignorance by analyzing modesty as essentially involving ignorance and arguing that modesty is a character virtue. Driver considers three accounts of modesty: the behavioral account, the understatement account, and the underestimation account. She argues that only the underestimation account describes the virtue of modesty. She claims that modesty and humility are closely related, except that a humble person could have an accurate self-assessment.

Garcia, J. L. A. “Being Unimpressed with Ourselves: Reconceiving Humility.” Philosophia 34.4 (2006): 417–435.

DOI: 10.1007/s11406-006-9032-x

Garcia defends an account of humility according to which the trait is an internal de-emphasis of the self. So, a person is humble with respect to some valued trait x to the extent that she is unimpressed that she has the disposition to play down the significance of her having trait x. A person is humble simpliciter when she is humble about enough of her valued or valuable traits.

Heft, James L., R. Firestone, and O. Safi, eds. Learned Ignorance: Intellectual Humility among Jews, Christians and Muslims . New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

A presentation of some of the religiously connoted work on intellectual humility. The authors look at three major religions and examine the ways in which acknowledged ignorance, doubt, and certainty can be useful, virtuous, or even necessary for a relationship with God. The text uses the notion of intellectual humility in a specific way.

Snow, Nancy E. “Humility.” The Journal of Value Inquiry 29.2 (1995): 203–216.

DOI: 10.1007/BF01079834

Snow’s article is a comparatively early and influential account of humility generally. Her method is to analyze ordinary language attributions of humility and being humbled and then to understand humility in light of this analysis. From these attributions, Snow gleans two distinct senses of humility: narrow humility and existential humility. According to Snow, both kinds of humility can help explain the character of a paradigmatically humble person.

Zagzebski, Linda T. Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781139174763

Zagzebski argues that virtues are central to ethics and epistemology. She defines virtues as an enduring and acquired excellence of a person that involves both that person’s deep motivations to bring about well-being for others and a degree of reliable success at doing so. Zagzebski understands intellectual virtues as a subclass of virtues more generally. And, more controversially, she argues that the intellectual virtues are a subclass of moral virtues.

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Greater Good Science Center • Magazine • In Action • In Education

Five Reasons Why Intellectual Humility Is Good for You

Do you ever find yourself mulling over your beliefs and opinions, thinking about why and how you came to hold a certain conviction, perhaps even questioning whether you might be wrong? Or maybe you can remember a time when you’ve learned some new information—in a conversation, in a book, or on TV—and you had an aha moment that changed a long-held opinion.

Those are examples of a concept that psychologists and philosophers call “intellectual humility,” which is defined by an appropriate awareness of our intellectual limitations and the recognition that beliefs we hold may be inaccurate or misguided. One common misperception is that having intellectual humility involves never trusting yourself—but it’s closer to the truth to say that intellectual humility is about correctly calibrating the strength of your beliefs to the evidence you’ve gathered and the limitations you face.

The science of intellectual humility is growing rapidly, and scientists are beginning to find that this kind of humility has far-reaching benefits, from how we approach learning and respond to failures, to how we perceive and are perceived by people who are different from us. Here’s an overview of this emerging science—and we hope that discovering these benefits can motivate you to cultivate intellectual humility in yourself!

1. Intellectual humility can help you learn new things

A series of five studies recently published in the journal Learning and Individual Differences examined how intellectual humility was related to “mastery behaviors,” which are characterized by challenge-seeking and persistence in the face of failure. After completing a challenging online learning module, study participants were asked how interested they were in learning more about the challenging topic, and then given the option to view a tutorial on that topic.

As predicted by the researchers, the people who were higher in intellectual humility reported being more interested in the challenging topic, and they were more likely to watch the tutorial. The researchers found a similar pattern of results outside of the lab. In high school classrooms, the students higher in intellectual humility were more likely to respond to their test scores with mastery-oriented intentions, like: “For my next test, I will try to determine what I don’t understand well.” This impression was shared by teachers, too. At the end of the semester, teachers rated students’ mastery behaviors, and the researchers found a strong association between student’s intellectual humility and mastery behaviors in the classroom.

The authors of this research believe that these findings may be explained by one potential driver of intellectual humility: curiosity. Building on prior evidence, they suggest that people who are intellectually humble may be more genuinely curious and interested in learning—and so they are more likely to persist in the face of failure and seek out challenges.

2. You’re more likely to investigate further when confronted with opposing views and false information

In a 2018 study , researchers collected information on participants’ political beliefs on several issues and then presented them with a written statement of what was purportedly another participant’s opinion on one of the same issues. However, the statement was secretly pre-prepared by the experimenters so that it always expressed the opposite view as the participant. Later, researchers offered participants the opportunity to learn more about reasons that either supported or contradicted their opinion—and it was those higher in humility who chose to learn more about reasons that opposed their own view.

These scientific findings paint the humble individual as curious and eager to learn, but one more study hints that intellectually humble people are not indiscriminate about the information they choose to believe. A study , recently published in  Social Psychological and Personality Science , found that intellectually humble people presented with false headlines about COVID-19—such as “mask wearing can be dangerous and ineffective”—were more likely to spend time fact-checking the headline or reading more about the source of the headline. That’s a result echoed by other recent studies .

3. Intellectual humility might improve your relationships

The benefits of intellectual humility don’t end with how we approach and evaluate knowledge—it might also improve our relationships. Although maybe not immediately obvious, this link makes a lot of sense. Would you rather have a conversation with someone who is adamant that they are right, with no regard for the quality of their evidence or their limitations (which would suggest low intellectual humility)—or someone who takes those things into consideration and is open to the possibility that they were wrong? What about someone who sees no value in your opinions and beliefs, would you expect them to have your best interest in mind?

A group of researchers , led by Benjamin Meagher at Hope College, paired participants as discussion partners and looked at two things: how intellectual humility is related to how people perceive each other and whether intellectual humility is related to certain patterns of communication. The researchers found that partners perceived people who scored higher in humility as being more open-minded. Later, when partners were asked to rate each other’s intellectual humility, they found that individuals rated humble by their partner were also more likely to be seen as warm, friendly, and generous. When researchers examined speech patterns, they found that although intellectually humble people talked more, they asked more questions, used less negative language, and provided more reasons to support their viewpoints.

Expanding Awareness of the Science of Intellectual Humility

This article is part of our three-year GGSC project to raise awareness about intellectual humility research and its implications.

Other research has documented a relationship between intellectual humility and other “prosocial” qualities like empathy, gratitude, and altruism. In a 2017 study published in the Journal of Positive Psychology , Elizabeth Krumrei-Mancuso found that intellectual humility was, indeed, related to a whole host of prosocial outcomes and value systems. People who were higher in intellectual humility showed more empathy, were more concerned about the well-being of others, valued having power less, and were more altruistic. Additionally, the higher someone’s intellectual humility was, the more likely they were to report valuing and wanting to protect the welfare of all people and things.

4. You can better build bridges with different kinds of people

It might seem more obvious that intellectual humility could be a cure for political polarization and religious dogmatism. Indeed, that’s exactly what research is finding.


There are two seminal papers that examined the relationship between intellectual humility and extreme attitudes. Both studies, led by researchers at Duke University, found that intellectual humility predicted less extreme attitudes on a variety of topics that included physician-assisted suicide, government use of drone strikes, and the impact of religion on society. It is crucial to note that intellectual humility was associated with less extreme attitudes but not with more support or opposition for any one position. That is to say, people higher in intellectual humility generally had more “centrist” views and were not any more likely to indicate that they supported, say, physician-assisted suicide than that they opposed it.

Importantly, intellectual humility is unrelated to political orientation, according to most studies to date . Whatever side you’re “on,” the other side is, on average, no less likely to be intellectually humble. They might even be just as altruistic or empathic as you, in their own way.

The picture with religion is more complicated. Research from Pepperdine University suggests that religious participation may be associated with less intellectual humility. According to that study, that’s because people who are more religious are more likely to endorse conformity and deference to an authority figure. However, other work has found that there is no relationship at all between religiosity and intellectual humility. In any case, if there is a relationship between intellectual humility and religiosity, the research suggests that it is quite small.

5. Intellectually humble individuals are more tolerant of other people

But there’s more to polarization than just our attitudes about social issues. Maybe even more important is the interpersonal aspect: how we view and treat our opponents.

Other research , also from Duke University, has directly examined how intellectual humility is related to perceptions of opponents on political issues and willingness to affiliate with them. The study focused on several contentious political issues, like abortion, fracking, and immigration. After rating their support for an issue, participants shared their moral and intellectual perceptions of people who held opposing views.

Generally, people had unfavorable perceptions of the moral character and intellectual capabilities of their opponents (although this varied by issue)—but people higher in intellectual humility had more favorable impressions of their opponents on both dimensions. In a later study, the same researchers found that participants higher in intellectual humility were also more willing to “friend” and “follow” people on social media with views that differed from theirs.

A report in the Journal of Research in Personality took those findings one step further and examined how intellectual humility was related to emotions toward political opponents. Assessing feelings like anger, contempt, and disgust, the authors’ conclusion complemented the findings from the previous studies: More intellectually humble people feel significantly less intense negative emotions toward their political opponents. The researchers also found that the higher a Democrat-identifying participant’s intellectual humility was, the less likely they were to think that the Republican Party was a threat to the nation; the exact same was true about Republican perceptions of the Democratic Party.

Despite mixed evidence about the link between intellectual humility and religiosity, similar work examining the connection between intellectual humility and religious tolerance also points in the same direction. Among a group of nearly 200 Christian pastors, researchers found that intellectual humility was related to more tolerance and positive feelings toward non-Christians.

Taken together, this body of work suggests many reasons why it would be beneficial to cultivate intellectual humility. Unfortunately, researchers don’t yet have a “quick fix” for those times when we’re forgetting or struggling to be humble (they’re working on it, though, don’t worry). In the meantime, we should all take to heart this advice from psychologist Mark Leary : “The next time you feel certain about something, you might stop and ask yourself:  Could I be wrong? ”

About the Author

Tyrone Sgambati

Tyrone Sgambati is a research associate at the Greater Good Science Center and a Ph.D. student in the Department of Psychology at UC Berkeley. His current research investigates the joint role of intellectual humility and social network diversity in combating polarization. Prior to coming to Cal, he obtained his Bachelor of Science from the University of Michigan in 2019 with concentrations in philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science.

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If standards of thought are applied, a student has potential to grow into an individual who exhibits the intellectual character described by the Paul- Elder Intellectual Traits. These intellectual traits include intellectual integrity, independence, perseverance, empathy, humility, courage, confidence in reason and fair-mindedness (Figure 1). - By Crest + Oral-B Professional Community

Intellectual integrity  – this trait requires that the standards that guide actions and thoughts need to be the same standards by which others are evaluated. an individual exhibiting this trait treats others with kindness while avoiding harm and outwardly projects this trait. this trait eliminates double standards and hypocrisy., intellectual autonomy  – this trait requires an individual to use critical thinking tools, such as the paul-elder model, and to trust their own ability to reason critically. for example, a dental professional exhibiting intellectual autonomy will ask questions about new products and will critically think through all aspects of the products to determine their implications of use. these individuals do not have to rely on others to do their thinking., intellectual perseverance  – the tag phase for this trait is "never give up" and encourages individuals to work through any difficulties. a clinician exhibiting intellectual perseverance has to depend on their critical thinking toolkit to keep working through challenging patient issues or unfamiliar situations., intellectual empathy  – an individual achieves intellectual empathy when they actively put themselves in someone else’s shoes in terms of how they think and feel. for instance, a dental clinician may encounter a patient who has a different viewpoint about certain dental preventive agents such as fluoride. a clinician exhibiting intellectual empathy strives to understand the patient’s point of view in order to think fully about the situation before responding to it. while the clinician does not have to agree with your patient’s point of view, intellectual empathy demands that they accurately represent the thinking of a different view despite what they believe., intellectual humility  – individuals exhibiting intellectual humility accept they are human and that they do not know everything. they continue to learn and grow as they age. they acknowledge their limitations. dental professionals exhibiting intellectual humility are okay to tell patients they are not familiar with a certain product, technique, condition or research behind the product or technique, and acknowledge that they are an ongoing learner in the profession., intellectual courage  – individuals with intellectual courage stand up for their beliefs and the conclusions they have fully thought through, especially when it is difficult to do so. sometimes it will not be a popular or common thought, but if they stand up for their beliefs, change can occur., confidence in reason and fair-mindedness  - utilizing the elements of thought and the standards will lead to confidence in reason and fair-mindedness and requires individuals to look at all of the evidence and relevant points of views and arrive at conclusions that embodies the intellectual traits. this allows dental professionals with confidence in reason and fair-mindedness to trust, as thinkers, to come to sound conclusions for patient care simply by applying the framework to their thought process. 2-6.

Dr. Richard Paul briefly defines and discusses the Intellectual Traits and the importance of fostering their development in students. Excerpted from the Spring 2008 Workshop on Teaching for Intellectual Engagement. Apr 15, 2008 - (9:53)

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Humble Approach Initiative

Intellectual Humility

Psychologists and philosophers are working to tease apart the ways we respond to new ideas and information — and the possible benefits of intellectual humility. 

Saint Augustine famously called humility the foundation of all other virtues. One variety of humility, intellectual humility, is perhaps the most foundational when it comes to the interests of the John Templeton Foundation.

Intellectual humility is a mindset that guides our intellectual conduct. In particular, it involves recognizing and owning our intellectual limitations in the service of pursuing deeper knowledge, truth, and understanding. Such a mindset appears to be valuable in many domains of life — from education to interreligious dialogue to public discourse. It promises to help us avoid headstrong decisions and erroneous opinions, and allows us to engage more constructively with our fellow citizens.

Over the last decade, psychologists, philosophers, and other researchers have begun to explore intellectual humility, using analytical and empirical tools aimed at understanding its nature and implications. At once theoretically fascinating and practically weighty, the study of intellectual humility calls for collaboration among researchers from fields of inquiry including psychology, epistemology, neuroscience, and educational research. In recent reviews of research commissioned by the John Templeton Foundation, Fordham University philosopher Nathan Ballantyne and Duke University psychologist Mark Leary synthesized findings from dozens of recently published articles on the topic, highlighting both the answers, and the questions, they raise.

DEFINITIONS

Researchers in the field have not settled on a unified definition of intellectual humility. Theorists have treated it variously as a personality trait, a cognitive disposition, a set of self-regulatory habits, an intellectual virtue, and an absence of intellectual vices. Sometimes intellectual humility is defined as a fully general trait, guiding people’s responses to evidence across a wide array of situations; other times, it is characterized as a way for people to manage their responses to one specific belief or set of beliefs.

Surveying the definitions offered in the literature, certain common features emerge. Intellectual humility speaks to people’s willingness to reconsider their views, to avoid defensiveness when challenged, and to moderate their own need to appear “right.” It is sensitive to counter-evidence, realistic in outlook, strives for accuracy, shows little concern for self-importance, and is corrective of the natural tendency to strongly prioritize one’s own needs.

In a nutshell, intellectual humility helps us overcome responses to evidence that are self-centered or that outstrip the strength of that evidence. This mindset encourages us to seek out and evaluate ideas and information in such a way that we are less influenced by our own motives and more oriented toward discovery of the truth. When we discuss important, controversial issues with others, our initial responses to their arguments tend to be shaped by our preferences, identities, and prior opinions. It buffers against those responses so that we can become more “truth-oriented.” It helps us overcome our self-centered inclinations in discussion and learning, making us more likely to follow the evidence where it leads and positioning us to better understand the truth.

Researchers have presented a number of models for how this virtue functions. Some suggest that it moderates particular attitude-forming tendencies, making intellectually humble people more likely to reconsider their views and less defensive when their beliefs are challenged. Others say that it helps us accurately evaluate our beliefs and intellectual weaknesses. Still others posit that intellectual humility reduces our concern for our own intellectual self-importance. Finally, mixed accounts combine these features in various ways. All of these models of intellectual humility assume that different types of mechanisms regulate self-centered responses to evidence, but each one suggests that intellectual humility helps people become better attuned to evidence and less beholden to self-oriented motives.

MEASURING INTELLECTUAL HUMILITY

Attempting to measure this trait can be, for the researcher, a humbling experience. As with many personality trait measures, gathering self-reports is an obvious place to start. But since intellectual humility is often seen as a valuable or desirable trait, people may be motivated to claim to be more intellectually humble than they really are. This may be amplified by a so-called “modesty effect,” which suggests that truly intellectually humble people will be modest in their reports, leading to lower self-ratings, whereas people who lack it will exaggerate, inflating their self-ratings.

Artist Marina Muun depicts a garden in the shape of a person’s profile. It has paths to all other gardens and contains a multitude of flowers from the surrounding ones. This illustrates the impact of considering other people’s ideas and holding them in a way that lets them flourish.

Although researchers do not agree whether there is a modesty effect, some have worked to bypass its potential influence by creating non-first-person measures. In essence, if we want to know whether certain people are intellectually humble, don’t ask them — ask the people who know them. But even these other-reporting measures have limitations since observers’ perceptions may themselves be biased. They may, for instance, attribute higher levels to people who agree with their beliefs and values than to those who do not. Following insights from research on general humility, intellectual humility might best be observed by others in certain kinds of situations: during interpersonal conflict, while receiving praise, in hierarchical relationships, or in interactions across different cultures or among those who embrace different norms.

Finally, related fields such as cognitive neuroscience may soon yield alternative ways of measurement. Recent work using EEGs to measure subjects’ brain activity when they make errors points to potentially less subjective ways of measuring this trait.

INTELLECTUAL HUMILITY AND WELL-BEING

Researchers tend to presume that intellectual humility is better for people than contrasting traits such as intellectual arrogance and closed-mindedness. Some claim in particular that intellectual humility improves well-being, enhances tolerance for other perspectives, and promotes inquiry and learning. Such claims, if true, would show why encouraging people to grow in intellectual humility is worth the effort. But at present there are many more unsettled questions than well-supported answers.

Consider, for example, the claim that intellectual humility increases well-being. A contrary suggestion is found in work on how we relate to our beliefs when defending ourselves against challenges to our worldview. On the one hand, some people treat their beliefs as a source of comfort and self-confidence in the face of challenges; they tend to display high levels “existential security,” having come to terms with weighty questions about meaning and mortality. On the other hand, intellectually humble people are more tentative about their challenged beliefs and display lower levels of existential security. It’s currently unclear, however, what such findings tell us about the relationship between intellectual humility and well-being. Existential security is typically measured using self-reports, and so one possibility is that when people hold “defensive” beliefs, they tend to self-enhance and report more security than they in fact experience. People who use their beliefs to resist worldview challenges may exaggerate their security because their beliefs suggest they ought to feel secure.

ENHANCING TOLERANCE

Another proposed benefit of intellectual humility is that it enhances tolerance or respect for the beliefs or ideas of others. Ego-defensive reactions can lead people to discount, disparage, and even shun out-group members. In the interplay of intellectual humility and religious belief, some studies have suggested that among monotheists, those who are intellectually humble are more tolerant than those who aren’t when it comes to interacting with those from different traditions. But the limits of tolerance based on intellectual humility are not yet well-understood — it is possible that an intellectually humble Christian would be more tolerant of Jewish or Muslim viewpoints than they would be of those of a Hindu polytheist. Or perhaps there are no correlations among these variables at all.

If intellectual humility does not lead to boundless tolerance, it may at least help people overcome what Freud called the “narcissism of small differences.” This is a central topic for future research given that political and religious debates can spiral into ever-increasing fractiousness and polarization. If intellectual humility does in fact make people more tolerant, the value of that outcome may depend upon the range of differences they can tolerate.

A TOOL FOR LEARNING

It is sometimes claimed that intellectual humility improves inquiry and learning. Intellectually humble people may well have better access to others’ perspectives. But even if such people seek out different perspectives, they may not always get what they’re looking for. There are many obstacles to perspective-taking, including the so-called “curse of knowledge,” the inability to think about a topic from a less well-informed viewpoint. Even if intellectual humility makes people desire to understand others, they may not be able to truly “enter into” alternative standpoints unless their intellectual humility also mitigates the biases that inhibit perspective-taking. Researchers also note that intellectual humility can help people know when to listen to experts. It may encourage proper dependence because it lets people discern the difference between what they know on their own and what’s known by depending on others. And proper dependence may flow from the fact that intellectual humility is a non-self-centered state: since intellectually humble people are less dismissive and hostile toward knowledgeable others, they are more inclined to trust what experts tell them.

STRATEGIES FOR INCREASING INTELLECTUAL HUMILITY

Most people who carry out research on intellectual humility assume that it is something we should try to foster. Depending on one’s views of the sources of intellectual humility, different potential interventions may seem promising. If metacognitive ability (thinking about thinking) is a key driver, then interventions could focus on developing metacognitive skills that enhance it.

If intellectual humility is primarily enhanced or hindered by our degree of personal security, a particularly cautious course may be necessary for interventions, as emphasizing novel ideas about intellectual humility could be perceived as a threat to deeply held values. Still, some research with an exemplar-based intervention (teaching students to write and think in ways that align with how humble people write and think) found that although the participants may have felt challenged by the exercises, the result was that they felt humbled, increasing their levels of lasting humility in the process.

Finally, work on situational primes and so-called nudging strategies suggests there may be ways for subtle cues and positive reinforcements to increase intellectual humility. Researchers have have found that subjects who make judgments inside school buildings are more likely to endorse greater spending on education. In the same way, there may be environments or sets of cues that can increase or diminish our levels of intellectual humility in certain settings.

DIRECTIONS FOR FUTURE INQUIRY

Our understanding of the subject has expanded considerably over the last decade, but much more remains to be explored and clarified. Reviewing the literature, it becomes clear that the field is ripe with potential for greater collaborations, ranging from workshops and seminars to the creation of permanent university-hosted interdisciplinary centers that could serve as hubs for research and publishing on intellectual humility and related concepts. One of the benefits of interdisciplinary partnerships is that it forces researchers to recognize the limits of their individual academic domains. As Sir John Templeton himself once noted, in thinking about humility we can foster humility within ourselves.

STILL CURIOUS?

Download the research summary on intellectual humility.

Listen to this episode of Philosophy Talk : “ How to Humbly Disagree. ”

Watch the video “ The Joy of Being Wrong .”

Check out a new book Humble by grantee Daryl Van Tongeren

Discover our other research papers on discoveries. Explore topics such as:

• positive neuroscience
• benefits of forgiveness
• science of free will
• science of generosity

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