Intellectual Humility

What might be a good candidate for a necessary personality characteristic for leading in complex, uncertain, and ambiguous times? I would nominate intellectual humility. IH involves recognizing that one’s beliefs and opinions may be incorrect. I note its resemblance to the notion of fallibilism in pragmatic philosophy, where one acknowledges that a personal belief may be fallible.

Psychological research sees intellectual humility as independent, different, from low self-confidence and even from the general notion of humility. Intellectual humility (IH) deals with how people think about themselves and the world. One might consider it a meta-cognitive that involves how one thinks about one’s thoughts.

Psychologists generally see IH as a trait or disposition in which a person exhibits IH across situations. At the same time, the idea of a trait or a personality characteristic does not suggest that people act the same way all the time or that their behaviors cannot change. Although dominantly a cognitive feature of people, psychologists sometimes suggest that IH can have motivational, emotional, and behavioral features. The following summarizes a very recent paper by Mark Leary, a professor in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University.

Cognitive

People who score higher in IH tend to believe their beliefs might be incorrect compared to people who score lower on IH. High IHs are also more likely to pay attention to the strength of evidence about factual claims. They also are more interested in understanding the reasons why people may disagree with them. These patterns suggest that people with high IH are more likely to think about the accuracy of their beliefs than people who assume they are right about most things.

High IH correlates with a more accurate sense of being wrong. People who score higher in IH exhibit less confidence in their incorrect answers but not in their correct answers compared to people with lower IH scores. They more accurately distinguish between real and fake stories or topics than those who score low in IH. Thus, high IH people seem to have more accurate beliefs about their own knowledge.

Motivation

People who score high in IH tend to be highly motivated by a proactive, inquisitive approach to knowledge. Their intrinsic enjoyment of learning new information motivates their higher curiosity. They also tend to exhibit more distress when they feel they do not understand something or lack information. Thus, high IH people are more motivated to think compared to low IH people. They enjoy thinking and mulling over issues and solving intellectual problems. In summary, high IH people possess the epistemic motives of curiosity, thinking, and pursuit of knowledge.

Some motives are related to low IH. People who want definitive answers to questions and definitive decisions score low in IH. People low in IH have a difficult time dealing with uncertainty and ambiguity. People who have a high need for closure are motivated to decide quickly, often without obtaining enough information. They also resist revisiting decisions. Yet notwithstanding these shortcomings they tend to more confident than correct. The motivation to quickly reach decisions and be confident about these decisions may spur people into being low IH.

Interestingly, evidence regarding IH and personality characteristics like egotism and narcissism is mixed.

Emotions

People with low IH have stronger emotional reactions to information that is contrary to their beliefs. They also have stronger emotional reactions to people who disagree with them. High IH people can also be troubled by being wrong, but for different reasons than low IH people. Having a strong aversion to being wrong can be the result of efforts by high IH people to evaluate information, keep their minds open, consider alternatives, and being vigilant for incorrect beliefs. In other words, high IH people can sometimes find their intellectual limitations discomforting.

Behavior

The behavioral aspects of IH relates to two facets of behavior. As suggested earlier, high IH people spend greater effort to obtain and consider information as they go about forming beliefs and making decisions. This behavior deals with how people obtain and process information.

The second facet deals with interpersonal behavior. People with high IH tend to be more open to other people’s views. They show less rigidity and conceit regarding the beliefs and opinions of others. More so than low IH people, those high in IH have greater empathy and more respectful attributions for why others may disagree with them. Low IH people, in contrast, more so tend to insist that their own beliefs are correct and to disregard people who hold different views. These behaviors by low IH people can produce strong reactions to differences of opinion as well as an unwillingness to compromise. This often leads to escalation in conflict with people who disagree with them. High IH people, on the other hand, may encourage others to contribute more ideas to discussions, generating much fuller discussions.

Research shows that high IH correlates moderately with the trait of agreeableness (the degree to which, for example, people are friendly, forgiving, and sympathetic). However, there is no necessary conceptual or psychological connection between one recognizing his/her own fallibility and one being positively disposed to others more generally.

What may lead to IH?

The answer to this question involves the role of genetics, parenting, culture, education, and other circumstances. IH appears to be partly heritable, as do virtually all personal characteristics or traits. IH correlates with both openness and to a lesser extent with agreeableness.

But personality traits are also influenced by people’s experiences, such as how they are raised and what they learn. This suggests the role of parenting is important. Children pay attention to how parents, teachers, and others express certainty or uncertainty or they manage disagreements, for example. Some parents may strongly socialize their children to be open to new ideas and experiences or encourage their children to explain and justify beliefs and attitudes.

Relative to culture, certain belief systems may discourage IH. Research suggests that many religions teach that they alone have the truth, which may discourage IH. For example, some research shows IH is negatively associated with religious fundamentalism. Do certain belief systems discourage IH or do people low in IH move toward beliefs that seem absolute and unassailable?

Education may have opposing effects on IH and this may be especially true with higher education. As people learn more, they could become more aware of how much they do not know and how complicated and endless knowledge becomes. Or, people could become more assured in their knowledge as they become an expert in their field of study. Possibly, education may increase IH generally while lowering IH in an area of one’s expertise. Possibly as well, more education may develop more refined and nuanced beliefs in people than what they previously held. Thus, education may lower IH. It may encourage people to conclude that their views are better than they previously were. This may lead them to think they are better than those of people who have not undertaken extensive education. Overall, education may fine tune the extent to which one’s IH is calibrated, adjusted, with respect to one’s knowledge. People, thus, may develop a clearer sense of what they do and do not know. If so, high IH people more accurately track the validity of their beliefs more accurately than they otherwise would.

Research demonstrates that when people experience an existential threat, they become more entrenched in their views. Increased threat and greater closemindedness are associated. Perhaps people under an ongoing sense of threat may be inclined to be lower in trait IH and that episodes of threat may decrease state IH for most people.

Ideological Moderation

Neither the extent to which people believe and practice a religion nor political affiliation correlate consistently with IH. But people who hold more extreme religious or political views, in whatever direction, tend to be lower in IH than people with moderate views. They may hold their beliefs more strongly that people who hold moderate beliefs. Generally, people who hold more extreme views tend to be less humble intellectually. Higher IH people may see more nuance and complexity in the issues they are addressing.

Can IH Levels Change?

Research suggests IH can change through either a personal decision to be more intellectually humble and through outside intervention. People must believe becoming more intellectually humble will benefit them. This belief may be associated, for example, to improved decision making, developing improved interpersonal relations, or developing organizations. People must also believe that being higher in IH has no significant downside.

Comment:

The concept of IH can inform how we think about leaders and leadership and also how we think about the current nature of our polity and society. From the perspective of leadership, IH seems positively associated with the concept of mature leadership and dissonant with that of immature leadership as discussed in earlier posts. Prospectively, IH may be negatively associated with hubris and narcissism.  To me, high IH along with fallibilism may be requirements for leading in a world that is ambiguous, complex, and uncertain.

From the perspective of our polity, I reflect on the deterioration, especially since the mid-1990s, of comity and compromise within Congress. Without what is called “regular order” (among other changes) in Congress, choices and rhetoric has become increasingly binary and extreme. In our society, both media and cable news as well as our internet-based social media tend to illustrate, at least in my opinion, the evaporation of IH. I would go on to include public discourse and even civil society as exhibiting a dramatic decline in IH.

What may be most troubling is that low IH may now be be the dominant role modeling seen by society. For example, think about whether most people today believe certainty, decisiveness, and strength are very desirable attributes.

Future posts within the “how we got here” category and the “leadership” and “discontent and democracy” subcategories will deal with IH.