Intellectual Humility and Humbling Environments – Part 1

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, it ignores the inherent difficulty of developing intellectual humility, the constructive role that arrogance can play in our intellectual lives, and the importance of manifesting humility at the level of collectives.

Teaching people to recognize and own their intellectual limitations – by, for example, having them consider the reasons their convictions may be wrong – is a lofty ambition. Unfortunately, it’s not very realistic. Someone who lacks intellectual humility is not adept at recognizing their own intellectual limitations; since this is itself a limitation, such a person is 

unlikely to recognize when and how they are intellectually arrogant. And given how socially desirable it is to be humble, each of us has incentives to overlook our more arrogant tendencies. For these reasons, the intellectually arrogant may be least likely to use humbling strategies when they should. 

The good news is that we can, and often do, become more intellectually humble without any explicit training or instruction. When we fail to recognize our limitations, we make mistakes; when we get actionable feedback about our mistakes, we become better at recognizing their sources. And we make fewer of them. People become better at calibrating their confidence – estimating the probability that their judgements are correct – with surprisingly little practice, as long as that practice involves rapid feedback. The general tendency towards overconfidence disappears without having to be strategically addressed. The intellectual arrogance that we manifest early on in this process may even play a crucial role in our persisting long enough to show sustained improvement. 

Furthermore, individuals needn’t recognize their own limitations when they can be pointed out by others. This happens quite naturally in settings of collective deliberation, such as informal debates or discussion forums, where arguments and information are respectfully exchanged. The danger is that we can be too responsive to the contributions of others and reach consensus before fully coming to grips with the weaknesses and limitations of the views under discussion. 

This kind of herding is most easily avoided when collectives include vocal dissenters who do not easily give in to an emerging consensus. In order to be effective, such holdouts must be consistent and uncompromising in the face of opposition. Their lacking some intellectual humility might actually be an asset to their playing this role effectively.

All of this being the case, I argue that it’s often better to develop intellectual humility through prolonged practice or collective deliberation than it is to bring intellectual humility to these activities. Doing so, however, requires that such activities take place in humbling environments. I will list and explain the essential features of such environments in next week’s post.