Show notes
Can intellectual humility be measured? What influences it and affects it, limits it and enhances it? What even is it, scientifically speaking? We explore all of this and then play an episode of How to Be A Better Human featuring psychologist Tenelle Porter telling comedian Chris Duffy how she is researching how to conduct better research into intellectual humility.
Highlighted moments
when researchers asked for people's opinions on topics like healthcare reform or carbon taxes, people tended to produce strong, emotionally charged positions, but when asked to explain those issues in detail, most realized they had only a basic grasp and as a result, their certainty dipped and their opinions became less extreme.
“the opposite of intellectual humility is intellectual rigidity it's like extreme certainty”
“something that is surprising to me is that we see sometimes if you're really really like turned way up in terms of how aware you are of the stuff that you don't know that can actually make you a lot less willing to show that to other people”
“intellectually humbler teenagers were doing better in school they were learning more and they were more kind of persistent so if they got negative feedback or a bad test grade they were like okay I I'm not giving up like I'm going to redouble figure out like change code whatever figure out what's going on and try harder next time”
Transcript
Introduction
0:01Reese Witherspoon here, checking into my favorite hotel in Paris. Bonjour. Bonjour. I'm traveling with my Wells Fargo Autograph Journey card, so I earn rewards wherever I book travel. Five times points with hotels, four times with airlines, three times on restaurants and other travel, and one point on other purchases. Phew, that was a lot. I need to lie down. Is the room ready? Visit wellsfargo.com slash autographjourney. Terms apply.
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Podcast Introduction
0:48Welcome to the You Are Not So Smart podcast, episode 344.
1:35Science is more than a body of knowledge. It's a way of thinking, a way of skeptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility. This is the You Are Not So Smart podcast.
Intellectual Humility
1:56I am David McCraney, and that was the late, great astronomer and science communicator, Carl Sagan, talking about intellectual humility. And if you've been listening to this show for a while, you are well aware of the fact that the concept of intellectual humility and our lack thereof, the scientific study of intellectual humility and our lack thereof, is one of the main themes of the show. So, in this episode, after I tell you some really neat things
2:28about intellectual humility, I will play you an episode of another podcast called How to Be a Better Human, in which a psychologist who studies intellectual humility named Tennille Porter tells comedian Chris Duffy all about her latest research into how to conduct research into intellectual humility.
Defining Intellectual Humility
2:49But, before I hit play on all that, I'd like to take a moment to talk about this fascinating and often misunderstood term. You just heard it from Pulitzer Prize-winning astronomer and planetary scientist Carl Sagan. Here's the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman also talking about intellectual humility. I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.
3:21I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I'm not absolutely sure of anything and the many things I don't know anything about. But I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell, possibly. It doesn't frighten me. And here is the award-winning journalist, Farrah Nasser. We all think we're right,
3:52and that's dangerous. A recent survey by Ipsos shows that 69% of Canadians believe that the average person lives in a bubble on the internet, yet only 31% of us think this about ourselves. So that means we're surrounding ourselves by like-minded individuals, with like-minded individuals, both either at the other end of a keyboard or in person, and we're shedding out people with whose opinions we may not agree.
4:23We're creating a silo, right? What happens in a world where we lack intellectual humility, in a world where we all think we're right, we get angry?
Understanding Intellectual Humility
4:41Okay, so what is this thing, intellectual humility? Well, we usually take the psychological frame whenever we're discussing things on this podcast, and when psychologists use this term, intellectual humility, it means the degree to which you recognize, accept, and willingly admit the limitations of your cognitive abilities. So what does that mean? Well, to be intellectually humble is to embrace the likelihood that on any topic,
5:12big or small, you might be wrong about some or all the things you believe, feel, and assume, thanks to an assortment of biases, fallacies, and heuristics. And intellectual humility requires an understanding that the word wrong can mean many things. Acknowledging the possibility of your wrongness could describe admitting the beliefs you hold in high certainty could be false, or the attitudes you currently hold might be founded
5:42on poor or incomplete evidence, or the opinions you routinely share could be biased, and very well could change if someone were to present you with good arguments to their contrary. Complicating matters, and we're going to do that a lot in this episode, is the fact that we often feel like we are well aware of all of these things. But the research into intellectual humility reveals that though we may think of ourselves as open to new ideas and perspectives and conscious of our
6:12individual levels of ignorance from subject to subject, we tend to approach most situations with an undeserved overconfidence in our understanding.
The Illusion of Explanatory Depth
6:23For instance, in a study by Leonid Rosenblatt and Frank Kiel back in 2011, researchers asked participants to rate how well they understood the mechanics of everyday things like zippers, toilets, and locks. People usually rated themselves as having a pretty good grasp of how such things worked, but when asked to provide detailed step-by-step explanations, most could not do that. And that fact came as a surprise to the people who previously believed
6:54they could do those things, provide step-by-step explanations, explain it in detail. Psychologists call this the illusion of explanatory depth, the belief you understand something better than you truly do. It's a cognitive bias, one of more than 180 we've identified so far, and each of these reliably skews your perceptions and affects your judgments from one moment to the next. This one in particular, the illusion of explanatory depth,
7:26it leaves you overconfident in your understanding of most things and thus unmotivated to truly understand them. Until one day, your zipper will not zip, your toilet will not flush, and you can't figure out
Personal Experience with Misconceptions
7:42why. Later, studies have revealed the illusion of explanatory depth extends well beyond zippers and toilets and bicycles and helicopters and coffee makers. For instance, when researchers asked for people's opinions on topics like healthcare reform or carbon taxes, people tended to produce strong, emotionally charged positions, but when asked to explain those issues in detail, most realized they had only a basic grasp and as a result,
8:12their certainty dipped and their opinions became less extreme. But that doesn't often happen. You don't often get that question right to your face. Please explain that thing that you feel very strongly about in detail. And studies like these reveal we have a rather complicated relationship with our own ignorance. we tend to discover our incomprehension by surprise, sideswiped from our blind spots because we were unaware those blind spots existed.
8:43For the most part, that's because we rarely go looking for evidence of our ignorance unless motivated to do so. And when motivated to do so, we often try to prove to ourselves that we were right all along, especially when we feel like we have a pretty good grasp of what is and is not so.
9:14Over the years, I've learned a lot of things that required me to unlearn a lot of other things before I could add the new things I learned to the collection of things I thought I knew
The Importance of Intellectual Humility
9:26for sure. For instance, I used to believe the 1938 radio broadcast of the War of the Worlds led to a mass panic, but it did not. Rumors of such a panic spread via newspaper think pieces at the time about how getting news from anywhere other than newspapers was a bad idea. I also used to believe you could boil a frog, a live frog, by slowly and gradually raising the temperature of the water it was in.
9:56And it turns out that is not true. They jump right out once they become uncomfortable. I also used to believe lemmings sometimes marched off cliffs because they blindly followed each other while walking in a single file. And that one's been a nugget of popular but untrue folklore since the 1800s. Long before the 1990s video game that perpetuated the myth with its whimsical gameplay. and the 1950s Disney documentary that did the same
10:27by tossing an unsettling number of real lemmings off of a cliff. In each case, right up until the moment I received evidence to the contrary, all this misinformation, these supposed facts, felt true to me. I had believed them for decades and I had accepted them in part because they seemed to confirm all sorts of other ideas and opinions floating around in my mind. Plus, they would have been great ways to illustrate complicated concepts if not for the
10:57pesky fact that they were in fact not facts.
11:03That's one of the reasons why common misconceptions and false beliefs like these spread from conversation to conversation and survive from generation to generation to become anecdotal currency in our marketplace of ideas. They confirm our assumptions and validate our opinions and thus they raise few skeptical alarms. They make sense and they help us make sense of other things and as Carl Jung once wrote, the pendulum of the mind oscillates between
11:33sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong. Which brings me back to the topic at hand, intellectual humility. It's a fun term to say, intellectual humility. It somewhat ironically sounds fancy and smart and something an educated person who is
12:04not all that humble would utter in reference to something another not all that humble educated person just referenced over a teacher of absinthe or something. In reality, it's a very simple concept at least on the surface but then again so is everything so ironically to proceed with intellectual humility is to assume that everything is more complicated than it first appears including intellectual humility.
Breaking Down Intellectual Humility
12:32So with that in mind, let's take a look at this idea one word at a time. Intellectual The word means something that is in the domain of the intellect and the intellect is an abstract term and catch-all word slash concept related in the old Latin to intelligence which itself is related to the concept of understanding
13:02and understanding is a word that truly originally meant to stand under slash among something but metaphorically as in to be close to it underneath its shadow near that which is throwing the shadow and in terms of a thing that has meaning to stand under to understand it is to comprehend it to grasp the idea of it so intellect
13:32is an umbrella term slash concept and category for all the stuff that feels like understanding and knowing things but also thinking things and thinking about thinking and also thinking about thinking about thinking and so on it's everything that might fall into a conceptual bucket related to using the mind to make sense of stuff both real and imagined both physical and mental
14:03in that bucket are concepts like reasoning both the philosophical kind and the psychological kind and the latter the psychological kind it's just coming up with reasons and justifications and rationalizations and arguments and opinions intellect includes all that plus making plans and building mental models and agreeing upon definitions and so on all those things but it is also understanding or attempting to understand all those things
14:34especially in the abstract which is to say using words that aren't exactly concrete in the way a word like banana is pretty concrete because it refers to a thing that seems to truly exist outside of the mind something that two people could point at thinking in the abstract isn't like pointing at a banana it's thinking about things using words about things that exist mostly in the mind like reason and truth and justice and beauty and bravery and kindness
15:05and ownership wisdom intelligence intellect and yes that which is intellect you all okay so that's intellect you all the other word humility comes from a very old word in proto-indo-european that's the language family that preceded many many modern languages like english and german and french
15:35and so on and that very old word was the term for the earth as in the ground and dirt and all things dirt like and earth in at some point that became the word hummus in latin which also meant all those things so to be humble was to be on the ground metaphorically which is to say low in rank in a system of things that are ranked taken further metaphorically it came to mean meek
16:06and modest and not egotistical or boastful or braggadocious or performative humility as an idea as a concept later evolved as a metaphorical category and became an abstract term for remaining unbothered by the fact that you aren't the best at everything or even most things to be humble and to carry yourself with humility came to mean that you accept you are not a god
16:36or a demigod and taken to the extreme you aren't even a particularly fantastic human in all regards therefore intellectual humility requires you to accept and be unbothered by the fact that there are things you do not know and that there are things you do not understand and then the next level of intellectual humility is to accept and be unbothered by the fact that your opinions are changeable the things
17:07you believe might be wrong and the attitudes you hold might be the result of experiences you've had and if you have new experiences those attitudes might be different then full and true and total intellectual humility is to recognize that you use a brain to make sense of the world and that brain has limitations and biases that make you inherently fallible that fallibility is biological
17:38and that biology generates your mind and your memories and your emotions and it can lead to all sorts of wrongness moral ethical factual attitudinal behavioral and more so to be intellectually humble is to understand that the things you assume you understand may not be truly understood and the things you think feel believe and do are always worth reconsidering especially when you encounter new experiences and information
18:08and interactions with other brains that challenge and or contradict your current understanding your current assumptions and your current concepts of what is and is not so to be intellectually humble is to accept that you are the unreliable narrator in all the stories you tell yourself about yourself and about others and about the world in general and then if you want to go even deeper you can
18:39and if you want to get even weirder you so can okay
The Deep Weird Level of Science
18:50the deep weird level science as a word comes from a latin verb scientia which means to know it came from an older word which meant to divide into parts and that same word gave us words like incision and schism scientia is in other words like conscience to know your own conduct and omniscience to know everything that can be known
19:21and pre-science to know beforehand you can be conscientious you can imagine a being that is omniscient and you can kind of sort of as a person be prescient which is to say you can know something is going to be true before it is a thing that has become true for instance if you plug the best observations and calculations we have concerning the star at the center of our solar system into a computer you can then quote unquote know
19:52it will one day swell into a red giant and swallow the earth that is decidedly prescient because it isn't a prediction a prediction would be a maybe prescience is certainty it's knowing which leads me to a fun word I hope you add to your vocabulary knee science to be miscient is to not know something that can't be known ever at least not by you
20:23it's not even knowing that you can't know it for instance your cat your cat can't read or understand the terms and conditions for Spotify so if your cat clicked on I agree before signing up for the service we wouldn't consider that binding and there are vast expanses of ignorance your cat can't even imagine and could never
20:54gain the knowledge required to rid itself of that ignorance that's the definition of miscience at least that's the one I prefer because once you accept this definition applies to cat knowledge you can begin to wonder about parallels in human knowledge are there some things that just like your cat you can never know that you can never know are there things that maybe no human can ever understand because our bounded rationality is limited in ways that
21:25require a more complex and powerful mind making thing than the human brain to comprehend are there levels of understanding in domains like physics that are as distant from human understanding as the human level of understanding of watchmaking is to orangutans I think I pronounced that correctly orangutan orangutans orangutans it's fun stuff I'd like to think that we've got the capacity to understand quite a bit and that the universe is mostly
21:55comprehensible to us given enough study enough dividing into parts enough science but it is with great intellectual humility that I must accept that this is merely an assumption on my part I don't know what I don't know about knowing things in my experience I will say that this never really bothers scientists the way it seems to bother the rest of us the way it seems to bother people
22:26whose worldviews require an unyielding certainty it certainly doesn't bother scientists as much as it bothers people who have found themselves within ideological and tribal identity extremes like cult members or conspiracy theorists or religious zealots or polarized political reactionaries also in my experience the most intellectually humble people in the world are scientists because every single time they read a new paper it requires them to fully engage
22:56in intellectual humility especially in their own areas of expertise every experiment they run is an exercise in intellectual humility if they start to stray from that other scientists will notice and let them know and then they'll let everyone else know the fall from grace for refusing to accept you might be wrong in science is a career threatening plummet science the institution works
23:27because unlike politics and business the people in scientific institutions will shame and ostracize their peers for not accepting evidence that calls into question their prior assumptions the primate part of us that is ultra social and cares a whole lot about what other people think of us science repurposed that to maintain a culture where one's reputation depends on constantly pursuing and demonstrating and proselytizing
23:58intellectual humility i can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing i think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong this all reminds me of the work of carl sagan science is more than a body of knowledge it's a