Intellectual humility: The benefits of acknowledging what you don’t know

You can hear Tenelle Porter discuss the virtues of intellectual humility with Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens on The Minefield.

“I disagree with myself.” That’s what a third-grade boy said in front of his math class during a discussion about even and odd numbers. He believed six was both even and odd. When one classmate presented counterevidence, he considered her point. “I didn’t think of it that way”, he said. “Thank you for bringing that up.”

This third grader was exhibiting intellectual humility — recognising the limits of his knowledge and valuing the insight of someone else. In a culture in which confidence is admired and mistakes are mocked, his admission is commendable. But does such intellectual humility have any real benefits for learning?

On the face of it, maybe not. University professors, some of the most learned individuals in the world, are not generally known for their intellectual humility. And plenty of successful scientists, CEOs, doctors, artists, and political leaders master their trades without appearing to develop much intellectual humility. Then again, as the astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar after winning the Nobel Prize, believing that you “must be right” — in other words, lacking intellectual humility — can actually stymie discovery, learning, and progress.

Given this puzzle, my colleagues and I set out to test whether intellectual humility was empirically associated with learning outcomes.

Intellectual humility and learning

We started by measuring high school students’ intellectual humility. We had students rate themselves on statements like “I am willing to admit it when I don’t know something” and “I acknowledge when someone knows more than me about a subject”. We wanted to know: Would this self-reported intellectual humility relate to students’ motivation to learn, their learning strategies, and even their grades? What’s more, would teachers observe any differences between students with differing levels of intellectual humility?

We found that the intellectually humble students were more motivated to learn and more likely to use effective metacognitive strategies, like quizzing themselves to check their own understanding. They also ended the year with higher grades in math. We also found that the teachers, who hadn’t seen students’ intellectual humility questionnaires, rated the more intellectually humble students as more engaged in learning.

Next, we moved into the lab. Could temporarily boosting intellectual humility make people more willing to seek help in an area of intellectual weakness? We induced intellectual humility in half of our participants by having them read a brief article that described the benefits of admitting what you do not know. The other half read an article about the benefits of being very certain of what you know. We then measured their intellectual humility.

Those who read the benefits-of-humility article self-reported higher intellectual humility than those in the other group. What’s more, in a follow-up exercise 85 per cent of these same participants sought extra help for an area of intellectual weakness. By contrast, only 65 per cent of the participants who read about the benefits of being certain sought the extra help that they needed. Combined with the rest of this research, this experiment provided evidence that enhancing intellectual humility has the potential to affect students’ actual learning behaviour.

Together, our findings illustrate that intellectual humility is associated with a host of outcomes that we think are important for learning in school, and they suggest that boosting intellectual humility may have benefits for learning.

The importance of a growth mindset

Because we observed that intellectual humility boosts learning, we wondered how to foster it. Our hypothesis was that adopting a growth mindset could help. Growth mindset is the belief that intelligence is something that can change over time. In contrast, fixed mindset is the belief that intelligence is permanent, something people are “born with”.

It makes logical sense that intellectual humility would come more easily to those operating in a growth mindset. When people adopt a growth mindset, they tend to believe that even if they don’t know something, they can learn it and improve their intelligence. They believe they can get smarter, and being humble is one strategy for doing that.

We ran an experiment to test this prediction. We found that when we temporarily induced a growth mindset of intelligence, participants’ self-rated intellectual humility was enhanced (at least temporarily). Our more recent work also finds this result in a real classroom with effects that endure beyond a single school year. This suggests that teaching students a growth mindset of intelligence is one way to increase intellectual humility and its related learning benefits. By contrast, emphasising the importance of high intellectual ability, or “brilliance”, as necessary for success, suppresses intellectual humility.

Implications beyond the classroom

Given the link between growth mindset and intellectual humility, it’s reasonable to wonder whether intellectual humility offers any unique benefits or whether it’s all down to having a growth mindset. There is reason to think intellectual humility may help people learn above and beyond the benefits of growth mindset. For example, it may increase openness to learning from the opposing view during disagreements, increase willingness to scrutinise misinformation, and decrease dogmatism in ways that a growth mindset may not.

Of course, there’s a lot about intellectual humility that we don’t yet understand. But the burgeoning empirical research suggests that intellectual humility can benefit learning and perhaps bridge ideological gaps. We all, not just school-age children, might be a bit better off by learning to say “I disagree with myself” every now and then.

Why intellectual humility matters

So then, when you approach life with intellectual humility, you open your mind to learning. You are able to learn from opposing views and have more constructive discussions, even when you disagree. No matter how old you are, with intellectual humility you become wiser. It helps you be less judgemental of others, learn more in school, and be a better leader.

Ask yourself, then: How many of these things are true?

• I question my own opinions, positions, and viewpoints because they could be wrong.
• I reconsider my opinions when presented with new evidence.
• I recognise the value in opinions that are different from my own.
• I accept that my beliefs and attitudes may be wrong.
• In the face of conflicting evidence, I am open to changing my opinions.
• I like finding out new information that differs from what I already think is true.

Once you’ve come to recognise the importance of intellectual humility for your own growth as a person, there are some helpful ways of encouraging intellectual humility in others.

First, model it. Admit when you do not know or understand something: “That’s a good question. I don’t know the answer, but let’s look it up.” Appreciate others’ insights and let them know when they raise a point that you hadn’t considered: “I never thought of it that way, so it’s interesting to hear what you have to say.” Be willing to change your mind and let people know when you do: “I’m convinced by articles I've read about the problem, so my views have shifted.”

Second, celebrate it. Recognise when someone demonstrates intellectual humility: “I appreciate how open you’ve been to learning more about all sides of this issue.” Look for examples of intellectual humility in science, politics, and other areas; highlight these on social media.

Finally, enable it. Value learning and point out that learning happens when you acknowledge what you don’t know. At dinner, make a habit of sharing a question you have or one new thing you learned. Keep media from diverse perspectives in the house. Establish a birthday ritual of noting how you have changed your mind over the past year.

Tenelle Porter is Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational Psychology at Ball State University. An earlier version of this piece appeared in Behavioral Scientist and portions are adapted from Character Lab’s Intellectual Humility Playbook.