Arrogance is all around us: political polarization, exploitive leaders, societal unrest and injustice, escalating conflict, and burnout in the workplace. Yet, in an increasingly polarized world, where arrogance and certainty seem to reign, some leaders are quietly practicing another approach: intellectual humility
For example, 64 members of the United States Congress (about 15%) have joined the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, who state in their website that they “are tired of the obstructionism in Washington” and “are on a mission to change the culture of D.C.”, where proud Democrats and Republicans meet every week “seated at a table, debating, listening, and working together to help solve [the country’s problems].”
If Solzhenitsyn was correct that the “line between good and evil cuts through every human heart,” then we need relationships that help people slow down their tendency to assume they are right without sufficient regard for the ways they might not be. But how would that work? Are we all supposed to walk around saying, “No, no, after you”?
In the January 2023 issue of Open Access Government, we introduced in an eBook the efforts of an interdisciplinary research team that has received generous funding from the John Templeton Foundation to study intellectual humility (IH). There it was suggested that what divides societies at both the macro level (e.g., political and religious conflicts) and micro level (e.g., conflict among families and friends) is not the media or political structures per se, but rather a more basic vulnerability of the human mind.
Changes in technology and society merely exploit this propensity for bias. What if anything can the science of IH offer to help us understand the social psychological dynamics that lead to factions and division, and even to difficult communications and relationships between friends?
A simple example of a stress test
Consider the following example of why we may doubt the value of being humble when it really counts. Two of us (Josh and Donnie), now longtime friends for 20 years, found our first argument to be a tough one, because it cut to the heart of why relationships are hard. The context was innocent enough: we were helping a friend move. As is often the case when moving, the friend was offloading some of his stuff. Josh eyed the first item, a television. Not wanting to be presumptuous, he first asked if anyone else wanted it. No one did, so he claimed his prize.
But later, when a very average set of golf clubs came up for grabs, Josh did the same thing— he again asked if anyone wanted it. This time, Donnie spoke up. Now, they had a problem to solve—what was a fair way to divide the spoils? Josh suggested a “state it and rate it” system, whereby each person would state the reasons why they wanted the item, and give a rating from 1-10, indicating how badly they wanted the item. The highest number would get the item. For the golf clubs, the negotiation went something like this.
Josh: “Okay, I would like the golf clubs. I have not really played golf much, so it would be nice to get the chance to play more. I think I could make new friends, and it might be something I would enjoy. I would like the golf clubs, and I rate it a 6.”
Donnie: “Thanks Josh, those are good reasons to want the golf clubs. I want the golf clubs too. I was given a driver as a birthday present, but I need other clubs to play with my brother. Having this set of irons would complete my set. You currently do not have a driver or shoes, so these things would be more helpful to me. I also would be more likely to play, given that my brother plays, and I have also played more in the past.”
Josh: ‘Those are some interesting reasons,” Josh admitted. “But what is your number?”
Donnie (with a twinkle in his eye): “Oh, sorry, yes, “I’ll rate the clubs a 6.5.”
On the face of it, both had strong reasons for wanting the clubs. However, Donnie thought he had the more justified reason for the clubs than did Josh. How did this happen between two close friends who highly trust each other and who normally, even to this day, try to divide things evenly? Did either party employ much intellectual humility?
Things broke down for a different reason, one that we often face in the real world. Not all people are on equal footing. In the above example, Donnie had the advantaged position of going second. They both agreed to use a game that assumed a high level of trust to settle potential disputes that under some circumstances might have worked well. Although Donnie stayed within the explicit rules of the game, he exploited the advantage of going second. This scenario illustrates the importance of epistemic norms—what can we count on from each other, even when the situation might give strong incentives to cheat?
This illustrates just one of the problems that our team, and others working to promote intellectual humility in real life, have to resolve. How can people practice humility, including intellectual humility, without taking advantage of a privileged position (Donnie) or putting themselves at a perceived disadvantage (Josh) in making various decisions. In this article, we want to give a progress report on our team’s research on IH.
Most virtues sound like a clever idea—things like gratitude, forgiveness, or patience. These are all good things. But the problem is we do not always know when and how to practice such virtues. They need to be stress tested. Our goal in this article is to be transparent by framing some of the problems that might help us stress test intellectual humility in the real world.
Intellectual humility the state of the field: From non-existent to thriving
In the past decade, research on intellectual humility has gone from non-existent to thriving. A series of popular books have been written praising the potential benefits of humility when applied to one’s values, beliefs, and the fair exchange of ideas within groups, including one by team member Daryl Van Tongeren. For now, as is often the case, the books are ahead of the research. Before we try to frame the challenges we anticipate in helping people practice intellectual humility, it might be good to give a little context on our team and project. Over the last decade, we had three distinct projects.
The first one, spearheaded by Pete, involved an interdisciplinary team of philosophers and psychologists that focused on defining and creating measures of IH. We had yearly meetings to try to work towards consensus on definitions. Then, people went back to their labs to do their own thing. Each year, we gathered again to seek consensus and remain calibrated with each other. When meeting, we certainly did not sit around saying “No, no, after you.”
Instead, much like what we would expect from the Problem Solvers Caucus of the United States Congress mentioned earlier, we hashed out our differences and often left with our ideas partially intact—but tempered by the critiques of our friends and colleagues. Even more, we seriously tried to learn the value of each other’s different perspectives, including disciplinary norms. Although we were experts in our own area, we were novices in other areas. The group reminded each one of us to slow down.
Although we felt deeply committed to the values of our own training, we also tried as hard as we could to leave room to learn from the ways of doing things in other areas. In addition, the process of exploring areas of consensus gave us another way of honing in on the truth of the matter.
We met our objectives and produced several measures, yet many researchers remained dissatisfied and even skeptical that we are able to measure humility, whether intellectual or otherwise. The hope was for an interdisciplinary conversation to inform measurement strategies, but be careful for what you wish.
People’s loyalty to a relationship or identity
What eventually happened was dozens of philosophical accounts of IH, which may never be resolved, followed by even more measures of humility about beliefs and opinions. The process seems to have humbled the experts.
We also undertook a second project that commenced in 2016—spearheaded again by Pete, but he started to bring early career folks, including the other three coauthors of this eBook, into the mix—aimed at setting the stage for a transition to applied work. Using some of the measures developed in the prior project, we focused on studying IH in leaders across three contexts—business, religion, and academia. The planning for this project occurred before the 2016 election, a global pandemic, and what some referred to as a societal “reckoning” on race. Little did we know how timely our work would be. So, our work feels both deeply meaningful and important.
Scholars have barely gotten around to trying to help people grow in IH−which is the focus of our third project, just now beginning, headed by Donnie. Researchers know very little about how to form humble character in people—and how to train people to express humility in various roles or situations that may make humility more difficult to practice.
Taking stock, despite a flurry of scholarship over the last two decades, we should acknowledge how much wide-open territory remains. Maybe we need ways of making humility about beliefs and values easier, building it into various contexts so people are less tempted to put themselves first. We also need to better acknowledge the cultural limitations of how we think about humility. Within positive psychology, our approaches to practicing virtues have come under fire for cultural arrogance.
For extended periods, people lived in communities with more collectivistic cultures. Individualistically oriented Westerners are a new kind of people—marked by many signs that things are going poorly socially and existentially. We have learned to do things for ourselves. We are “bowling alone,” as the sociologist Robert Putnam has put it. Conceptualizing humility, both as an intellectual and a more general characteristic, within collectivistic cultures has barely been touched by researchers.
Intellectual humility: Living well with doubt
This story might sound discouraging, but we psychological scientists see opportunity.
We are on an adventure to understand how intellectual humility works in real life. How can people trust the virtue of humility when it counts? Stories about what is unknown are enough to build entire fields around. We have made considerable progress.
When we joined the study of humility around 20 years ago, serious doubts existed about whether humility, intellectual or otherwise, could even be studied empirically. That fear proved overblown, yet more time has not necessarily resolved other doubts. One of the things IH scholars discuss is the importance of living well with doubt. Certainty is risky, and sometimes we need to make clever
use of our doubts.
We only want to trust our conclusions when they have earned our trust. When we encounter good reason for doubt, this is an invitation to explore, and these doubts may very well provide leverage to progress our thinking. In this section, we describe six current doubts and how leaning into them, as daunting as they may be, can facilitate our efforts in helping grow into humble thinkers.
Doubt 1: Have we achieved definitional and measurement consensus?
Many research teams (including our own) have invested considerable effort in defining and measuring humility, both as a general characteristic and as it applies to the cognitive domain. While this work has been fruitful, it has led to a problem−we have succeeded at attracting many good ideas about IH, but so far, people prefer their own definitions and measures (an ironic twist given the topic being studied), and we have yet to find a compelling way to move people towards consensus.
One interdisciplinary team, led by early career scholar Tenelle Porter, has discussed this problem as a jingle/jangle fallacy where researchers may be studying different things but calling them by the same name. Researchers have an incentive to apply their current interests and use them to conceptually frame their work on IH. As a result, without a strong conceptual grounding, IH may just be a new name for something we have known about for a long time. In that case, investigators would be re-creating research on things that have already been studied. For example, cognitive psychology has long examined various biases and errors that favor one’s own perspective.
Furthermore, much ink has been spilt on measuring humility, including humility about belief and values. It is not a stretch to say that measurement has been the paradigm for studying humility. As a result, the number of measures is an “embarrassment of riches” as one early career scholar, Stacey McElroy, has put it. Indeed, developing good measurement tools is necessary, but such an intense focus on measurement may also be a problem. Without a solid conceptual framework, we may think we are measuring IH when we are measuring something else.
Response:
We think it is time, after 20 years, to move beyond definitions and measurement to some new questions. Thus, our group in the current project is working on applying various conceptualizations and measures already developed to such questions as: How does humility about beliefs, opinions and worldviews work? What is the process that links it to benefits (or risks)? When is it more helpful or harmful? How can we shift people’s attention so they have more ability to practice IH when circumstances would otherwise push them towards arrogance? If we make progress on these questions, we will inevitably continue the process of refining our definitions and measures of humility as we go.
Doubt 2: Is it too soon to focus on applied work?
A second doubt involves whether it is too soon to move towards interventions or applied work in IH. We understand these concerns. Most research (and measures) of IH are focused on traits, so we do not have many measures that align with the level of specificity (i.e., state IH) needed to study moment-to-moment changes.
Also, some have cultural concerns. They worry that we need more consensus on what IH and humility in general is and more knowledge about when it may backfire. Why assume humility about values and opinions is always good? Why promote humility if we lack sufficient understanding of its drawbacks? For example, it might hurt leader confidence in making difficult decisions if too much emphasis is placed on IH.
Practicing IH may also be a drawback for marginalized people such as racial ethnic minorities or women who may be socialized to defer to others, even in situations in which it would be beneficial to be assertive in one’s opinion or perspective.
Response:
In our current grant project, we gathered a pluralistic community of scholars, so now is the time to do the hard work of learning how IH works in real life. If not now, when? Waiting for the “just right” conditions (e.g., consensus on definitions, clear winner in measurement battles, large and clear research programs on benefits and risks) might cause us to wait forever. Would we even get started?
If we look at other thriving literatures in positive psychology—such as gratitude or forgiveness— we see a very different pattern. Applied researchers joined early on—they assumed benefits of the virtue and tested their ideas. They produced initial research linking the construct to benefits in physical health, mental health, relationships, and spiritual well-being. Later, other scholars qualified our understanding by noting situations or contexts in which the character strength might be less helpful (or even harmful). These projects attend to the question of “when,” because virtues must occur “at the right time, and for the right reason.”
Doubt 3: Will our efforts work well under pressure?
A lot of work starts with big picture problems in society, such as entrenched intergroup conflict or egregious problems of information distortion (e.g., conspiracy theories). Social psychology has gone through something termed a “replication crisis” (i.e., where subsequent research fails to replicate what prior research has found), which has attuned us to consider whether our research really matters.
Sometimes one can consistently get an effect in the lab, but it makes no difference in how people live their lives. Researchers are playing a game—they are making reductionistic decisions to constrain something overly complicated, which works for the game, but it also may make the knowledge less applicable to everyday life. Put people in real-world situations where the stakes are high, and they may behave quite differently than in the safe confines of the laboratory.
Response:
Again, this concern is daunting, and we take it very seriously. Right now, researchers are coming from different areas and implicitly contextualizing IH to different kinds of situations (business, psychotherapy, etc.). We could easily get so spread out that we fail to build understanding of how IH works. To avoid this problem, our team is focused on studying IH under duress—that is, we want to study intellectual humility when it is extremely challenging to put into practice. The key question: When is IH especially important and valuable?
One answer is that IH is especially important when one also holds commitments to ideas and relationships. For example, moral convictions may be a context in which it is very difficult to practice humility in the realm of beliefs and values. Someone could fall short in two ways, either by giving into pressure to conform to the view of others (servility) or by “taking a stand” when one “should have” accepted influence from others (arrogance). We want to invest in work that explores IH during high-stakes situations, perhaps because of psychological consequences (e.g., existential concerns) or social implications (e.g., pressure to conform to strong group norms within a particular religious, political, or social domain).
Cognitive and social psychologists have tabulated myriad possible cognitive biases. Many such biases involve people holding strong commitments. We need commitments to live well, and yet, commitments distort our thinking, especially when conflict and stress occur within relationships. Emotions also affect thinking. People’s loyalty to a relationship or identity may distort their thinking and decisions. Commitments may cause people to ignore contradictory evidence, resist admitting limitations, struggle to listen to other viewpoints, and treat ideologically dissimilar others with disregard and disrespect.
Our team has decided to focus on learning about the behaviors (e.g., intrapsychic, interpersonal, and systemic) that help people hold commitments well, with appropriate ownership of limitations and biases caused by such commitments. Commitment is good for many reasons, but it requires people to learn skills to balance or moderate these commitments as they participate in larger systemic and cultural structures. Thinking well is a community process.
In our current work, we are focused on IH in the context of commitment-related biases because there are long-standing and well-developed research programs across a variety of disciplines—including personality and social psychology (e.g., confirmation bias), organizational psychology (e.g., escalation of commitment), developmental psychology (e.g., identity development), counseling psychology (e.g., allegiance effects in psychotherapy research), psychology of religion (e.g., fundamentalism as closing off of one’s worldview to other forms of evidence), and even the philosophy of science. As part of the process of seeking to be right, a core feature of scientific mindedness is learning to balance commitment with also seeking out evidence that one may be wrong.
If all goes well, our work will encourage scholars to draw from and synthesize theories of commitment-related bias as they relate these theories to the study of IH. Successful projects will build on theories of identifying which thoughts, emotions, and skills are involved in regulating biases in the context of holding and acting on strong commitments. In addition, the progress on studying IH while holding strong commitment may guide research in other areas.
Doubt 4: What would a culturally sensitive form of intellectual humility look like?
Another set of doubts involves the potential for cultural problems when studying IH. Virtue language is often tied to a type of power—the ability to define good and evil within a community. Sometimes power is stewarded in a trustworthy way, and many of us have parents, teachers, or coaches that we credit with many of the opportunities we enjoy in our lives. These people were characterized by humility, including towards their own ideas and those of others.
But before we start building humility interventions and bringing them into places of work, education, or worship, more needs to be said about the potential for abuse of power when discussing humility. When we give someone credit for humility, it is a type of relational value. In a perfect world, humility might be good, but what if we live in systems that have different expectations or rewards for behaving in a humble manner? For example, might women, because of socialization, be expected to act more humbly than men? What if men are given more “credit” than women when exhibiting the same humility-related behaviors?
Response:
This is a critical concern, and it is not entirely resolvable. But let us illustrate the problem. It is a silly example, but Donnie has a four-year-old son, Emerson. Sometimes Donnie will take him out into public, and will try to be an engaged dad. Sometimes strangers will heap praise on Donnie for how engaged he is as a dad. For example, Emerson’s pediatrician gushes with praise every time Donnie attends an appointment.
Sure, she is aware of research on father involvement, and knows that Donnie is, statistically speaking, more likely to be the weak link in terms of emotional engagement. But it still seems less than fair to his partner when he gets undulating praise for what would be viewed as expected behavior by a mom. Similar dynamics could affect how women experience leadership expectations. So, it’s not surprising that, as we think about moving into the intervention space, there are woman or people of color warning us to think about the implications of power, role, and context when it comes to IH and to humility as a general characteristic.
A member of our team, Daryl Van Tongeren, has found initial evidence for a dark side of humility. In one experiment, participants rated men and women on humility in the work place. Women who shared their accomplishments were viewed as less humble and more arrogant—largely by men—compared to
their male counterparts who shared in the same way.
Women pay an arrogance penalty. Because modesty norms differ by gender, men get more credit for their humility than women do. So, if we promote humility within various systems, what kind of adjustment is needed for the way that cultures may grant credit for the expression of humility?
Two other members of our team, Stacey McElroy and Heather Battaly, have asserted that it is important to study the virtue of IH alongside the virtue of intellectual servility. In other words, some individuals or groups might be more likely to err on the side of being arrogant and over-confident in their beliefs— these people would likely benefit from working to increase their IH.
However, other individuals and groups (perhaps people who hold marginalized identities) might be more likely to err on the side of being servile or doubting their beliefs— these people would likely benefit from working to increase something different—perhaps their intellectual courage or pride. We cannot assume that IH operates the same way for all people and groups—we need to do more work to identify how one’s cultural and social standing impacts one’s experience and expression of IH.
Doubt 5: The field is currently lopsided
Psychologists disagree about how important representation is for the health of a field of knowledge. For example, how big of a problem is it that most psychologists lean in a politically progressive direction? How much of an issue is it that much of research in the field of psychology has been conducted on participants from WEIRD (i.e., Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) societies?
How big of a problem is it that the field of positive psychology (and IH) is currently heavily populated with white men, including the four authors of this article? When do these representational problems lead to epistemic problems in which the theories that are developed and the research that is conducted reflect but one limited perspective?
Response:
This is an important critique, and the bottom line is that we think representation matters. When representation is not present, science still works, but it works more slowly, results in more narrowed conclusions, and risks causing harm. Ideas are tested, and they are tested poorly when dissent is quelled or not even recognized as entirely missing. Lop-sided participation in science is an example of missing dissent. This is a structural weakness that can lead to a lack of integrity in a field— imagine a bridge with faulty concrete—it might hold, or it might not.
In the long-term, scholarship on IH will be limited if it does not attract scholars from a broad span of ideological and cultural perspectives. Applied research programs on forgiveness and gratitude represent helpful examples of how to effectively cultivate diversity of thought and community—it is critical to demonstrate the importance of a construct to areas such as physical health, mental health, relationships, and religion/spirituality (and how people cope with existential stressors).
Thus, in the current project, we strategically aimed to attract researchers from more applied fields, such as counseling, clinical, school, organizational, or health psychology. These are the subfields most likely to translate research on IH and apply it to the domains where it is most needed, such as business, education, religion, psychotherapy, and organizational leadership. To succeed in these fields, we will also work to attract scholars from a variety of cultural viewpoints, because these fields are complex social ecologies that need scholars who represent a broad range of perspectives. The research agenda will plateau quickly if we do not diversify the portfolio of scholars.
Doubt 6: What if things go wrong and We fail?
A final doubt is one that likely plagues all scientists when venturing out in a new field: what could go wrong? As the poet Robert Burns wrote, “the best laid schemes of mice and men go oft awry.”
Trial and error works well, if by “works,” one means that one is certain to have an “opportunity” to learn. But what if we make big mistakes? For example, we could waste serious money on things that don’t work, or we could promote IH and find out that, for some people, they needed something very different (e.g., focusing on proper pride).
Response:
The concern is clearly warranted, so we ought to account for the risks we take when we aim to study intellectual humility. The trick is to decide how to take calibrated risks that will help us learn—what Jim Collins calls “shooting bullets before cannonballs.” In a first step, we give our very best guess on how worldview humility works, and we do our best to help people engage practices that will help them express IH more consistently and when it matters the most. Then, we proceed with assumptions about a particular causal chain linking IH to benefits. In a second step, we sort the “wheat from the chaff.”
We watch what happens in our studies and look for answers to the question: “How are we wrong?”
There are many possibilities to go wrong or make mistakes, and each requires tweaking of our process. For example, we might get null results or small effect sizes, something common in positive psychology research. We might give too little weight to a key psychological process—such as the role of stress and emotions. Our approach might only work under low stress, but not when it really matters the most—when IH is under duress. We might fail to account for the role of relationships and larger systems. For example, thus far, people have tended to focus on humility and IH as if it is a solo sport like tennis.
This view might point us towards helping people manage emotions and stress that interferes with information processing and decisions. But some are beginning to say humility and IH are probably a team sport. If that line of reasoning is correct, then we need to help people embed themselves within external conditions that facilitate the practice of humility. For example, not staring at a screen with an algorithm optimized to increase anger and give people distorted information or not having people surround themselves with only like-minded people until many institutions begin to falter because of knowledge bubbles.
Finally, we embrace the challenge of potentially failing in the space of intellectual humility in part because intellectual humility bids us to do so—the quest for knowledge is worthy of pursuing, even if the possibility of failing is great.
Moving IH research into the real world
In this brief article, we have tried to give a snapshot of IH research and how we are attempting to move IH research into the real world and into contexts where it can help us with our most intractable problems—such as political polarization, racial tensions, and religious conflict. We have made progress in understanding what IH is and how we can measure it. We have also linked IH to important outcomes, both at the individual, relational, and community levels. The next steps are understanding how people can work to improve and apply IH in contexts where it really matters. Whether we can do that consistently remains an open scientific question.