Today's post is part 2 of a two part series from Steven Bland on his paper " Intellectual Humility and Humbling Environments ", published in Review of Philosophy and Psychology. Open science as a humbling environment In last week’s post , I argued that a lack of intellectual humility in individuals can have beneficial effects on individual learning and collective deliberation, but only in humbling environments. Designing, creating and sustaining such environments is one of the ways collectives can manifest intellectual humility. Humbling environments have the following five features: 1. They elicit evaluable behavior. 2. They produce actionable feedback. 3. They afford multiple opportunities to solve similar problems. 4. They incentivize the pursuit of intellectual goods. 5. They are forgiving without being overly permissive. Forecasting tournaments and open science are two prime examples of humbling environments. In forecasting tournaments, participants make d...
Today's post is part 1 of a two part series from Steven Bland on his paper " Intellectual Humility and Humbling Environments " Steven Bland Calls for intellectual humility are pretty common these days. A bit too common, perhaps. At least, that’s what I’ve recently argued . To be clear, I don’t think that intellectual humility is a bad thing. The tendency to recognize and own one’s intellectual limitations can be both virtuous and valuable. It has, after all, been associated with better information processing , lower acceptance of misinformation and conspiracy theories , and lower levels of outgroup bias . For these reasons, researchers have been anxious to design interventions to boost peoples’ intellectual humility. This work on the nature, causes, and effects of intellectual humility is not wrong, but it is incomplete. It focuses too narrowly on the positive aspects of intellectual humility as a disposition of individuals. In doing so, ...