What Is Intellectual Humility and Why Do We Need It?

 My oldest sister told me recently I was arrogant. 

1. : exaggerating or disposed to exaggerate one's own worth or importance often by an overbearing manner. an arrogant official. 2. : showing an offensive attitude of superiority : proceeding from or characterized by arrogance.

I disagree. This came up when we were discussing her not using my directions to find me, relying instead on her GPS. 

What I will admit to is impatience and vanity. That does not mean I do not feel a degree of self-consciousness. Which why I read JSTOR's What Is Intellectual Humility? - to double-check my self-evaluation.

Out of this passage, I got a sense of accomplishment:

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?

I have always been interested in finding things out more than asserting what I know is unimpeachably certain. I cannot remember when or why this came to be. However, I do recall my mother encouraging my curiosity. On the other hand, I recall when my depression had a hold on me, I believed the ere was nothing new to know and what I did know was useless. That may be the closest I came to asserting a certainty. It almost killed me.

Coming to mind as I re-read this passage is also my being brought up in church - that instilled a belief that we cannot know everything. That we can attribute to my mother also. Blame her for my interest in philosophy.

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.

I also had one teacher who told me to be agnostic, not in a religious sense, but in regard to what I know.

 I found this passage useful; if nothing else, it made a point I had not thought of.

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.

This passage made me think of William James and his theory of pragmatism. I first read James when I was 18. Where the truth is open to revaluation through verification and testing. I guess in this context, pragmatism makes certainty a contingent event.

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.

For more on James and pragmatism, try this 7-minute video.

 

For myself, I do not think I am as arrogant as people might label me. This does not mean that I need not be alert to the possibility. 

For the rest of you, it may help you better adapt to the world. We live in a country and world awash in conspiracy theories. It seems to me people are attaching themselves to these theories in a theological fashion. I will keep my theological feelings attached to God. Test these conspiracy theories by relating them to the real world, to real people, and not succumb to being frightened into irrationality.

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