Imperfect Cognitions

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, ...

This post is by Matteo Colombo . When we asked our readers to vote for their favourite post among the five most popular posts we ever published, Matteo's "Explanatory Judgment, Moral Offense and Value-Free Science" (27 September 2016) won by a large margin. So, on the occasion of our 10th birthday, we invited him to write for us again and update us on his research. Matteo Colombo Seven years ago I wrote a piece for Imperfect Cognitions , where I described a study aimed at investigating the relationship between explanatory judgement, moral offense and the value-free ideal of science. Conducted in collaboration with psychologists Leandra Bucher and Yoel Inbar , our study showed that the more you perceive the conclusion of a scientific study as morally offensive, the more likely you are to reject it as bad science. For instance, to the extent you find the conclusion that males are naturally promiscuous while females are coy and choosy to be morally offensive, you’ll dismi...

Today's post is by Matteo Colombo, Kevin Strangmann, Lieke Houkes, Zhasmina Kostadinova and Mark J. Brandt. Matteo How does intellectual humility relate to prejudice? If I am more intellectually humble than you are, will I also be less prejudiced? Some would say yes. In much of the early monastic Christian tradition, for example, humility is understood as a virtuous form of abasement grounded in self-knowledge and self-appraisal. In his Demonstrations , Aphrahat the Persian Sage —a Syriac Christian author of the third-fourth century—writes that “humility is the dwelling place of righteousness. Instruction is found with the humble, and their lips pour forth knowledge. Humility brings forth wisdom and understanding.” Aphrahat’s suggestion that intellectual humility is the antidote to vanity, pride, and prejudice, is representative of one traditional way of understanding this character trait. Mark Some would say no. The idea is that the self-abnegation and abasement constituting humil...

In this post I interview Duncan Pritchard , Professor of Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and Director of the Eidyn Research Centre . Duncan is currently leading two inter-related Eidyn projects on the topic of intellectual humility, both of which receive the majority of their funding from the Templeton Foundation. The first is an outreach project entitled ‘ Intellectual Humility MOOC ’. The other principal investigator on this project is Dr Ian Church. The aim of this project is to produce and run a Massive Open Online Course (or ‘MOOC’) on the topic of intellectual humility. The second project is a research project entitled ‘ Virtue Epistemology, Epistemic Dependence, and Intellectual Humility ’. The other principal investigator on this project is Prof Jesper Kallestrup. The aim of this project is to develop an anti-individualistic version of virtue epistemology and to explore the relationship between epistemic dependency and intellectual humility.