Intellectual humility and openness to the opposing view

Abstract

Strong disagreements have stymied today’s political discourse. We investigate intellectual humility – recognizing the limits of one’s knowledge and appreciating others’ intellectual strengths – as one factor that can make disagreements more constructive. In Studies 1 and 2, participants with higher intellectual humility were more open to learning about the opposition’s views during imagined disagreements. In Study 3, those with higher intellectual humility exposed themselves to a greater proportion of opposing political perspectives. In Study 4, making salient a growth mindset of intelligence boosted intellectual humility, and, in turn, openness to opposing views. Results suggest that intellectual humility is associated with openness during disagreement, and that a growth mindset of intelligence may increase intellectual humility. Implications for current political polarization are discussed.

Keywords:

• Humility
• open-mindedness
• growth mindset
• politics
• disagreement

Notes

1. We believe there are strong conceptual reasons to include both the self- and other-directed items in intellectual humility. Yet, we also investigated this matter empirically, separating the self- and other-directed items of our scale and re-running analyses to examine whether one component or the other was driving the effects. The general pattern of results remained the same when using only the self-directed items or only the other-directed items (e.g., both subscales significantly correlate with openness during disagreements in Studies 1–4), but the results were strongest when the full scale was used. This suggests that neither the self- nor other- directed items alone were responsible for our effects, but that they produced the strongest results together. We also note that the self- and other-directed items positively loaded on the same factor in exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses (see the Supplementary Materials), suggesting that they go together empirically. Full results from these analyses are available upon request.

2. General Humility is distinct from the personality dimension Honesty-Humility, which encompasses a person’s tendency to avoid fraud or corruption and greed, and to display modesty and sincerity (Ashton, Lee, & de Vries, 2014).

3. The effect of the experimental manipulation on intellectual humility remains statistically significant when these participants are included in analyses, p = .04.