Project Teams

In research, discoveries depend on willingness to embrace unknowns. Yet, recognizing and revealing ignorance can feel risky, particularly if doing so is believed to imperil success (or at least looking successful) in a context. We hypothesize that humble inquiry will be suppressed to the extent that a context (a field, lab, etc.) esteems high intellectual ability (brilliance) as important for success. The current project will test our hypothesis in real-world settings by surveying a large number of academics across the sciences and humanities to assess how much they:

1. perceive their field to emphasize brilliance,
2. feel comfortable (vs. anxious) recognizing intellectual limitations in their scholarly work, and
3. feel comfortable (vs. anxious) revealing such intellectual limitations.

We will also experimentally manipulate an emphasis on brilliance and measure effects on scientists’ humble inquiry. The philosophical component of our project will grapple with the value and disvalue of humility in academia, how brilliance-emphasizing academic environments shape humility’s value, and how humility may help or hinder scholarly achievements.

Embedded within these questions are potential conflicts between epistemic and instrumental rationality, individual and collective virtue, and ethical questions regarding how justice and oppression ought to be weighed when reasoning about these conflicts.

The value of recognizing one’s own ignorance as a point of wisdom has theoretical roots dating back to Socrates. But how exactly might the awareness that we ‘don’t know’ affect the process of inquiry? And are there varieties of ‘not knowing’ which affect inquiry in distinctive ways? Psychology research on representations of ‘not knowing’ have primarily focused on the greater phenomenon of experiencing a feeling of knowing. Philosophers have discussed a variety of ways of judging that one doesn’t know, including thought experiments when error is made salient, when luck is present, when it involves statistical evidence, and in high stakes contexts. Together, we aim to explore the potential of these philosophers’ thought experiments as a way to activate the experience of ‘not knowing’ and to test their effects on humble inquiry.

Truth and Reconciliation Commissions (TRCs) explicitly aim to open dialogue among victims, perpetrators, governments, and civil society that fosters the recognition and owning of truths about previous acts of violence. Thus, one of the aims of TRCs is to foster humility in inquiry (HI). Given that aim, the practices of TRCs are a natural place to look for HI. If TRCs are successful, we should expect to find humility in the inquiry and dialogue they foster. Our project focuses on two specific practices of truth and reconciliation: (a) Gacaca (community-based tribunals) as a response to the Rwandan genocide and (b) symbolic reparation at Campo Algodonero, ordered by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights against the Mexican state as a response to femicide. Both aim to foster HI, while sharing a focus on survivors of atrocities who may be prone to excessive HI, and thus aim to foster HI that is appropriate–not excessive. Our multidisciplinary team of Psychologists, Philosophers, and an expert on Symbolic Reparations will ask whether these practices succeed or fail in promoting HI that is appropriate, and what practices of TRCs that achieved these aims might look like.

Science requires skepticism towards others’ work and one’s own, and is thus an ideal site to examine factors that cultivate Humility in Inquiry (HI). We will pursue our project in two phases.

In Phase 1, we will develop and validate multiple text-based measures of HI. We will develop classifiers to identify types of HI from language that recognizes the limits of one’s knowledge, gives credit where credit is due, and/or expresses deference to others’ inquiries.

In Phase 2, we will examine how HI manifests across different contexts — namely open science, gender, and national culture. We aim to answer three research questions:

Does open science foster HI? Because they promote transparency, we expect pre-print servers like arXiv and Open Peer Review to foster HI.
Is HI gendered? We expect women researchers to express HI more than men researchers.
Does HI vary across national cultures? Scholars from nations with collectivist cultures should exhibit greater HI than scholars from nations with more individualist cultures.

By applying computational approaches to high-stakes scientific issues like climate change, and examining how the open science movement, gender, and national cultures influence HI, we will advance the understanding of intellectual humility.

In a preliminary study (n=799), we identified three types of information consumers: (1) “Sages,” who are politically engaged, knowledgeable, calibrated in their self-assessments, and low in authoritarianism, (2) “Zealots,” who are politically engaged, and opinionated, yet unknowledgeable and overconfident, and (3) “Apaths,” who are disengaged, unknowledgeable, and aware of their lack of knowledge, yet still wary of political outgroup members. The present project contains two separate components. The first will aim to identify the best predictors of these three classes so we can reliably identify Sages, Zealots, and Apaths in future studies and investigate the behavioral correlates of these classes, such as media consumption, forecasting ability, willingness to update beliefs, avoidance of ideologically dissimilar others. The second will aim to test and identify interventions that will turn Zealots and Apaths into Sages among both everyday people as well as scientists and experts.

Misinformation represents one of the greatest challenges for the functioning of societies in the information age. Extant theories suggest that people may fall for misinformation because they are unable to discern true from false information (truth insensitivity) or because they readily accept information that is congruent with their beliefs and dismiss information that is incongruent with their beliefs (belief bias). Previous empirical work by members of the project team found that (1) belief bias plays a more significant role for misinformation susceptibility than truth sensitivity and (2) belief bias is associated with high levels of subjective confidence in the accuracy of one’s beliefs. Based on these findings, the current project will investigate whether interventions to increase intellectual humility are effective in reducing susceptibility to misinformation via reduced levels of belief bias.

Conducting inquiry humbly requires recognizing and taking account of our limitations as individual inquirers. One way to do this is to defer to experts. When one defers, one identifies the expert consensus about an issue in (for example) science, medicine, or public policy, and then adopts that belief, setting aside one’s own personal judgment. Although deference to experts is discussed in both philosophy and psychology, the resulting insights from the two fields haven’t been integrated. Our project aims to put this right. In our first year, we’ll write a review paper synthesizing philosophical and psychological work on the topic and identifying pressing questions for future research. In our second year, we’ll conduct an empirical study. Throughout, we’ll focus on two questions. First, under what conditions should people defer to experts? Second, under what conditions do people defer to experts? We’ll consider factors such as topic of inquiry, complexity of issue, inquirer’s competence with the issue, and presence or absence of expert consensus. Only by investigating the two questions together can we assess the common claim that people don’t defer to the experts as much as they should, and begin to make suggestions for helping people to defer more appropriately.