Intellectual Humility

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Summary

A person with intellectual humility recognises that their beliefs might be wrong, and understands that other people can know considerably more than them in important fields.

When practiced well, intellectual humility opens people up to learning, improvement, and positive cooperation.

The absence of intellectual humility can lead to failure to learn, higher susceptibility to demonstratively false beliefs, and team tension. If someone won’t accept correction, then there’s nothing to stop them believing anything they want to believe, no matter how ludicrous.

Intellectual humility is an important trait to seek and develop in both individuals and organisations.

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About

Most of us have encountered someone at some point who just can’t grasp that they might be wrong – on anything. We may have even drawn the connection between that trait and the likelihood that they’re completely wrong.

Around 2015 the first papers were published that put a name to what appears to be missing in such a world view – Intellectual Humility.

Intellectual humility describes “the degree to which people recognise that their beliefs might be wrong” (Leary et al, 2017), how well they can “recognise one’s intellectual shortcomings” (Dykhuis, 2024). People with intellectual humility are more open than others to revising their views, respect for other’s viewpoints, lack intellectual overconfidence, and are more willing to change their views when confronted with convincing evidence (Plohl & Musil, 2023).

People with intellectual humility have a deep awareness that they are fallible, that other people are likely to know more than them on important topics, and that there will be many occasions when the best thing they can do is to be quiet and learn from the considered views of others.

Intellectual humility is a critical component of wise reasoning which, in turn, enables people to see things within a larger context, with flexibility, self-reflection and thoughtfulness (Grosman et al, 2016).

It’s also notable that intellectual humility is a stronger predictor of trust in science than either education or intelligence (Plohl & Musil, 2023).

People with low intellectual humility are more likely to be convinced that they are in possession of the one “Truth” – in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary (Robson, 2019), they’re more likely to react badly to people expressing different views, are less willing to negotiate or compromise (Leary et al, 2017) and, consequently, are more prone to conflict.

Importantly, people low in intellectual humility are more likely to be wrong. They’re unable to accept input that would otherwise improve or refine their understandings. They’re not open to exploring the logical inconsistencies of their arguments, and are more likely to ignore the expert opinion that could have otherwise help them to develop a more well-founded understanding.

Developing ourselves as individuals requires intellectual humility.

Building productive teams requires intellectual humility.

In fact, it’s hard to think of human situations that would not be helped by a dash of intellectual humility – from personal development and learning to corporate design, business delivery and team productivity, and on to political leadership and diplomatic negotiation. Intellectual humility is a critical trait in all human endeavours.

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Intellectual humility in teams

Intellectual humility in teams

In addition to being a critical attribute for individuals, intellectual humility is also critical for social interaction and the effective operation of teams. For every team, for every organisation, for every complex area of understanding, people need to be able to work together. Working together well requires a willingness to listen to others, to value the perspectives and expertise of others, to learn from others, and to realise that we, ourselves, don’t have all the answers (i.e.: we’re not gods). Working together well requires intellectual humility in all.

The absence of intellectual humility in teams

The alternative to intellectual humility in teams is, in short, failure. Closed-minded thinking, lack of cooperation, conflict, and failure to realise the value that connection across disciplines or world views can bring.

The practical manifestations of the challenges of low intellectual humility in teams have been summarised by one researcher in the field (Snow, 2022) as including “stubborn ignorance of the subject matter of another discipline, superficiality in approaching the subject matter of another discipline and failure to develop shared understandings of relevant concepts”.

Intellectual humility and Genuine MDTs

About Genuine MDTs, and why they’re different

Multi-disciplinary teams (MDTs) are, ideally, groups of people from different fields of expertise who come together to achieve a particular goal.

In most organisations, multi-disciplinary teams do genuinely involve multiple disciplines, but these disciplines tend to be quite closely related and, similarly, the people brought in tend to think of the world in quite similar ways, or at least from similar perspectives.

The term “Genuine MDTs” is used to delineate a type of MDT that’s more explicitly focused on ensuring it incorporates in to its core people with very different perspectives on life and work, from very different disciplines, and frequently very different brains (for more on the value of different brains, see Complementary Skills).

The importance of IH to Genuine MDTs

A central focus of Genuine MDTs is its bringing together of people with different areas of expertise to build the multiplied insights and value that come from different ways of understanding the world.

The successful operation of Genuine MDTs is dependent on team members being able to work with, an utilise, difference.

Furthermore, achieving the diversity of Genuine MDTs is dependent on bringing together people with brains that work in different ways, such as the significant proportion of top-level specialist experts who are neurodiverse. The different intuitive skills of experts with less common brain types mean that their skills are critical organisations.

Successful Genuine MDTs require people willing and able to take in ideas and insights that are very different from their own, see their value, learn from them, and build on them to create something better.

They require that teams work positively, constructively and calmly with conflict of ideas without that conflict becoming conflict of personalities and emotions.

The smooth operation of such diverse teams is dependent, above all else, on two key factors – team management practices and cultures that foster the positives of such diversity, and intellectual humility among all team members.

Almost by definition, achieving such constructive conflict across vastly different perspective requires team members strong in intellectual humility.

Intellectual humility, therefore, is critical to the healthy and productive operation of Genuine MDTs.

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The problem of autism and intellectual humility

It would be valid to ask why there is a focus on autism in an article on intellectual humility.
I’ve included this focus partly because I’m talking about my own group, but mostly because my advocacy for the organisational criticality of people with Level 1 autism (See Complementary Skills) encounters a significant obstacle when the need for intellectual humility in teams encounters the reduced likelihood of people with autism actually having that trait.
I believe, however, that there is a solution.

A description of the problem

  1. Most research into the foundational traits of intellectual humility point to emotional awareness being a critical prerequisite skill (Jarvinen & Paulus, 2017).
  2. By definition, people with autism are not particularly good at understanding other people’s emotions (DSM-V definition of autism, American Psychiatric Society, 2015).
  3. People with autism probably won’t be too good at intellectual humility.
    • If intellectual humility is dependent on emotional awareness, and people with autism aren’t good at emotional awareness.
    • From this, it’s not a great leap to conclude that people with autism are unlikely to be strong in intellectual humility.
    • Caveat part 1: At this point, there doesn’t appear to be any research directly investigating whether there is a correlation between autism and levels of intellectual humility.
    • Caveat part 2: Anecdotal indications, however, are that this is hypothesis is probably true. Clearly, however, anecdotes do not constitute a robust double-blind evidence base. More work is needed in this space.
  4. So, we have an issue. Intellectual humility is critical for many situations, but people with autism don’t have the preconditions for autism, so are less likely than the general population to intuitively demonstrate intellectual humility.

A hypothesised solution

  1. I hypothesise that the link between intellectual humility and emotional awareness is not a direct link. Theory of Mind is, I speculate, in the middle.
    • That is, intellectual humility is dependent on Theory of Mind.
    • Theory of Mind is, in turn, dependent on emotional awareness (in most people).
  2. Neurotypicals most likely develop their Theory of Mind at an early age from an intuitive awareness of the different emotional states of others.
    • They therefore develop Theory of Mind without specific training.
    • People with autism don’t have this foundation of emotional awareness, so don’t develop Theory of Mind to the same extent.
  3. It has been known for some time that people with autism are not particularly strong at Theory of Mind (Baron-Cohen, 1991)
  4. Psychologists appear to be of the view that it’s quite difficult to teach Theory of Mind to people with autism (Fletcher-Watson et al, 2014). The psychologists approach to this is to attempt to teach emotional awareness to people with autism.
  5. I hypothesise that this approach is inefficient, ineffective, and unnecessary.
  6. It may be possible, instead, to teach theory of mind to people with Level 1 autism using a functionalist approach.
    • That is, help people with autism develop a deep understanding of the logical construct of different minds.
    • In particular, help people to understand that it is logically inconsistent that other people would have an identical world view to you.
    • From that, and with some specific exercises exploring the concept’s implications, it’s not a great step to realise that it would be logically inconsistent to assume that other people’s experiences and knowledge is similar to your own.
    • The stipulation of “Level 1 autism” is an important one. I have no reason to believe that this approach would work as well for more significant forms of autism.
  7. From here, using this method, it would be a relatively small step to teach intellectual humility to people with Level 1 autism.

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References

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