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Intellectual Humility increases tolerance, improves decision-making
- ouid 10y agoThis isn't a study, this is an essay about an activity that some people did.
- coldtea 10y agoSo? Have essays and thinking outside of formal studies gone out of style now?
- ouid 10y agowell, in that case, I guess the real problem is what the subtitle claims. >Trait increases tolerance, improves decision-making, study says
- pottersbasilisk 10y agoIf you are trying to make wide general conclusions from it, Yes. Its probably due from once trusted institutions getting so much wrong from the health pyramid, replication crisis, even election polling. Nasim Taleb has a good series on why distrust is increasing. https://medium.com/incerto/the-intellectual-yet-idiot-13211e2d0577 https://medium.com/incerto/the-intellectual-yet-idiot-13211e...
- bjt 10y ago"The researchers, whose work is featured in the March 15 issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, conducted four separate studies to measure the trait and learn more about how it functions."
- ouid 10y agooh wow, 4 activities, good for them.
- desireco42 10y agoThis is one of those articles and studies we've been warned about. It doesn't mean anything, and you will be no better off reading it. It is interesting point but it can't be taken as a scientific pointer you should apply for your life. As a newspaper article, I actually like it.
- mlinksva 10y agoIt is a captive venue news article / press release _about_ a paper at DOI: 10.1177/0146167217697695. I've only skimmed so far, but seems interesting and meaningful. What fraction of papers can be directly applied to your life? When I read the paper more closely I'll be looking for some kind of apology for religion since it was funded by the Templeton Foundation.
- lutusp 10y ago> I've only skimmed so far, but seems interesting and meaningful. Any meaning the study might have would have to be validated by (a) a successful replication, and (b) construction of a falsifiable theory based on it, one that predicts behaviors and corollaries not yet seen. I won't hold my breath for that. Much of published psychology consists of taking a common belief that "everyone knows," crafting a study that seems to support it, then publishing the result without bothering to conduct a replication or suggesting a reliable, falsifiable theoretical basis. The thesis seems sound -- many people see humility as a positive trait. But that's why the study exists -- it's an example of confirmation bias in print. An equally plausible study could be crafted to prove the opposite point, but that study wouldn't be published. Psychology journals publish articles their readers like, and aggressively reject articles their readers don't like.
- trevyn 10y agoRichard Feynman: "A very great deal more truth can become known than can be proven."
- mlinksva 10y agoOne of the four studies asked a panel to evaluate pro-, anti-, and mixed essays about religion. Maybe this was what interested Templeton. A bit could be spun as an attempt to make religion acceptable, assuming the default that it is instead preposterous, or as a subtle positioning of atheism as just as dogmatic as theism: > Finally, intellectual humility was inversely related to the extremity of participants’ views about religion. People who recognize that their beliefs are fallible may maintain less extreme positions both because they realize that most issues are not incontrovertible and because they believe that extreme positions are, in general, less likely to be correct than moderate positions.
- pottersbasilisk 10y agoIntellectual humility doesnt get grants though.
- nine_k 10y agoSo use it at research time, and hold it back at grant writing time! Have some mania of grandeur handy :)
- sitkack 10y agoI call it grantcaine.
- RandomOpinion 10y ago> Intellectual humility doesnt get grants though. Amen. In industry, intellectual humility doesn't help get promotions or get hired either.
- jasonkostempski 10y agoIt does if you work for people with the trait.
- ouid 10y agoso it's dynamically unstable :P
- jrauser 10y agoThe most ferociously negative interview feedback I've ever written in my life was for a person who I thought lacked humility. In summation, I believe my exact words were "I don't care if he's God's gift to software engineering, we should not hire him."
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- lutusp 10y agoSummary: one unfalsifiable study, not replicated, with no theoretical basis or reference to other theories; a study unable to establish whether the measured trait (intellectual humility) and the measured effect (more effective functioning) are in fact related as cause and effect, or the reverse, or are both related to some third unstudied property. In a recent ambitious and well-funded replication project, only 39% of published psychology studies could be replicated at all, and of the successful minority, the average measured effect size was half that of the original study, in some cases falling below generally accepted standards for statistical significance. The take-away from the replication project is that, when reading a random psychology study, the reader must remember that the study's probability of having any relation to reality is less than 50%. More on this topic: http://arachnoid.com/psychology_and_alchemy http://arachnoid.com/psychology_and_alchemy
- kem 10y agoThe replication crisis is happening throughout science, including neuroscience, genetics, and oncology, to name a few: http://www.nature.com/nrn/journal/v18/n2/abs/nrn.2016.167.html http://www.nature.com/nrn/journal/v18/n2/abs/nrn.2016.167.ht... http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1360-0443.2009.02662.x/full http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1360-0443.2009.... http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/future_tense/2016/04/biomedicine_facing_a_worse_replication_crisis_than_the_one_plaguing_psychology.html http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/future_tens... In fact, some analyses suggest replication might be worse in the neurosciences than in psychology. The neurosciences are plagued by many of the same conceptual ambiguities in psychology, but with even smaller, expensive studies that are underpowered with more incentives to avoid sunk cost problems. The most accurate summary is that replicability problems affect the biomedical sciences the most in general (empirically speaking, psychology tends to be classified as a biomedical science, in topic analysis studies and so forth). Follow the money. You have lots of competition for limited resources, lots of money on the line, and soft or absent tenure protections. The link you provide amounts to nothing more than ignorant intellectual bigotry and killing the messenger. It's ironically sad, in fact, because psychologists and behavioral scientists are the ones exposing the replication crisis and doing the most to try to address the problem. The type of rhetoric in the linked essay amounts to a whitewashing of replicability problems in other areas, by denying the problem exists and is only true of "lesser sciences." The sort of defensive response represented by the linked essay allows scientists in other areas to avoid accountability and the threatening implications it has for other fields. Levels of analysis problems happen in all sorts of intellectual endeavors. Arguing that psychology will give way to the neurosciences is akin to arguing that nothing in the computer sciences is a legitimate topic of study unless it involves bare metal issues. Having said that, I also distrust this paper.
- moomin 10y agoYou could also add "Loses Elections"
- mamon 10y agoLast US elections were strange because it seems both parties chose their worst candidates. Any Democrat other than Hilary would beat Trump hands down, and also any Republican would win with Clinton by even higher margin.
- im3w1l 10y agoThe primary system selects the most popular candidate for the given party. Not for the population as a whole. So dem candidate will be "too" left and rep candidate will be "too" right. Of course this doesn't explain why this election was different from any other. I guess increasing polarization between left and right, makes it more of a problem in practice than usually.
- isaacremuant 10y agoIt's a fair theory but this election seems to go against it. Trump was not too right for the right. The establishment of the RNC was against him because he looked and had liberal ideas in many aspects. Being politically incorrect may make him look "more extreme right" to the left but there's no evidence that he is (When compared, for example, with another important primary candidate like Ted Cruz).
- moomin 10y agoI think you're touching on an important point here: the bits of the GOPs message that resonate with their base don't seem to match what the party thinks they are. Trump demonstrated a huge disconnect between the GOP and its own base.
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- MichaelBurge 10y ago> aimed at promoting qualities such as intellectual humility. Did the paper conclude that changing a person to be more intellectually humble causes the benefits described? If not, any promotion or changing of behavior seems premature.
- nabla9 10y agoPsychology is rubbish, that's already established, so there is no need to read this particular study before forming an opinion, or criticizing the study bases on it's merits. /s On the other hand, published psychological studies are probably better than opinion articles, essays etc. So maybe there is some value in it that. I myself find these four studies in the paper interesting in the context of ambiguity tolerance and critical thinking. Studies in personality and social psychology like these are usually best understood as some sort of cluster analysis. Most interesting points form the discussion chapter that draws from many other studies: 1. Many of the effect sizes for intellectual humility were relatively small 2. High IH might come together with epistemic curiosity, cognitive ability and ambiguity tolerance. 3. Most personality characteristics display substantial within-person variability across situations. So the studies probably reflected domain specific intellectual humility (IH). 4. Intellectual humility did not correlate with religiosity or political orientation. 5. Indicators for stubbornness, rigidity, narcissism, or defensiveness are not central aspects of low intellectual humility.
- angry-hacker 10y agoMaybe not rubbish, but it sure isn't science. Nice opinion article -- probably.
- trevyn 10y agoThe "intellectual humility doesn't get grants" and "loses elections" comments lead me to believe that people aren't understanding the concept of intellectual humility as presented in this article. It does not mean that you give the outward appearance of being humble in any way. It is defined in the article as "an awareness that one’s beliefs may be wrong" and "intellectually humble people can have strong beliefs, but recognize their fallibility and are willing to be proven wrong on matters large and small." This was tested with a study in which "participants read essays arguing for and against religion, and were then asked about each author’s personality", and evidence that "people who displayed intellectual humility also did a better job evaluating the quality of evidence." There is a distinction between an individual's internal mental processes (as tested in this study) and the way they present themselves externally. Being outwardly assertive and confident absolutely wins elections and grants, but this is not at odds with an ability to internally re-evaluate one's beliefs. I particularly enjoy this quote from the article, as it reveals that the authors may have missed a subtlety: “If you’re sitting around a table at a meeting and the boss is very low in intellectual humility, he or she isn’t going to listen to other people’s suggestions,” Leary said. “Yet we know that good leadership requires broadness of perspective and taking as many perspectives into account as possible.” I absolutely agree that good leadership requires broadness of perspective, but this does not imply that every suggestion should get an audience at meetings -- capable leaders often have a much broader range of experience than their reports, and dismiss suggestions not out of arrogance or closed-mindedness, but simply because they have already evaluated and discounted that path, and have elected not to spend their limited time bringing everyone else up to speed. (Which can have its own issues, but that's a digression.)
- aphextron 10y agoThe article also states that they were unable to find any meaningful differences between poilitical ideologies and intellectual humility, yet they go on to state > "They were also less likely to criticize that politician for “flip-flopping.” There was less variability among Democrats: Democrats, whether intellectually arrogant or humble, were generally less likely to criticize a politician for changing his mind." Completely refuting that point only a few paragraphs later. I think that this study, like all social science research, must be taken with an extreme grain of salt.
- rosser 10y agoCan't this notion pretty much be summed with the Bertrand Russell quote, "The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt"?
- rukuu001 10y agoAlso Feynman: "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool."
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- WhitneyLand 10y agoYes, but couldn't you argue it's preferable to be in group one? Imagine how great life would be running around with no doubt, full of confidence, and never having to deal with being wrong. Sounds like bliss.
- pdxandi 10y agoSounds like me as a teenager.
- AQuantized 10y agoI think there is almost always a part of you that knows, deep down, that you fallible. That is just from my personal experience contrasting myself as a younger person filled with hubris to my current self, though.
- contingencies 10y agoConfirmed in 1999 in the US and apparently known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect It is apparently not confirmed in other cultures, where interpersonal relationships are traditionally conceived of differently. Corresponding advice from http://highexistence.com/dunning-kruger-effect/ http://highexistence.com/dunning-kruger-effect/: Be confident in the areas that you suck at.
- sandGorgon 10y agoThis is the very googley concept of psychological safety right ? Google Rework has some great stuff about it https://rework.withgoogle.com/blog/how-to-foster-psychological-safety/ https://rework.withgoogle.com/blog/how-to-foster-psychologic...
- thetruthseeker1 10y agoThe one thing I would have liked to see in this article would have been the benefits and downsides of both qualities. Intellectual Egotism, and Intellectual Modesty. That would have been a balanced approach. There are people who know that they are intellectually modest that read this article, and it may reinforce their belief that being intellectually modest is the one true path! There are people who know that they are intellectually arrogant and may feel that they are destined for hell by reading this article. There are some advantages to being an egotist as well and disadvantages being modest. The other subtle incoherence I wanted to point out is, at some point the author claims intellectually modest people are in both classes of people, conservative and liberals. But he does say that republicans by and far are more likely to not accept a person who has "flip flopped" [may or may not be for good reasons] than a democrat. So assuming most conservative people are republicans, and most liberal people are democrats there is some intellectual quality that differentiates their bases. This probably needed more analysis in my opinion.
- dlwdlw 10y agoHeres a model i though of: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2014/02/20/the-cactus-and-the-weasel/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2014/02/20/the-cactus-and-the-wea... The core is a 2x2 with strength of views on one axis and holding strength on the other. A fox is someone who knows many things and a hedgehog is someone who knows one big thing. The degenerate versions are the cactus, which stubbornly knows one thing, and the weasel, whose views ate too two-faced. The weasal does double-think while the fox can hold contradictory models in mind and create a new one or use the one that better fits the situation. (e.g particle wave theory) The fox has better perspective, but because energy is spread out among too many things, has trouble implementing. The hedgehogs energy is directed and more focused with more momentum, but still has the ability to steer, unlike a cactus. Intellectual humility IMO is about flexibility of mental models. In terms of real world success, hedgehogs have the most while foxes are more armchair philosophers. The article is telling cactuses to be more like hedgehogs, but the 1 dimensional terminology ropes in foxes as well, who despite having intellectual humility as well, don't usually have as much direct impact on the world.
- sova 10y agoOh my god the dawning realization that I have absolutely no intellectual humility absolutely terrorizes and embarrasses me. I can change.
- Sharlin 10y agoYoung people everywhere think they know everything. A big part of the thing we know as "wisdom" is acquiring enough experience and metacognitive skills to realize how little one knows, and to act accordingly.
- sitkack 10y agoMetacognition should be the main focus of K-5. Everything else follows.
- hawkice 10y agoI mean, for that timescale, I personally would prioritize making sure the kids know not to poop on their desks and not to scream indoors, but sure, metacognition, that's good too.
- antisthenes 10y agoThere's no limit to the amount of success you can achieve if you set the bar low enough!
- sova 10y agoEarly childhood is very formative as a time-period and even at this age young humans can have a strong sense of propriety. There are some character traits that are exceedingly positive and simply need nurturing to blossom. Our system positively filters for obedience, what we really need is more creative minds.
- pm90 10y agoAbsolutely agree that the emphasis on obedience is anachronistic. We need a lot more creative minds; the education system that was originally designed for churning out soldiers and factory workers needs to be realigned for the new economy.
- contingencies 10y agoThere is some related material in the written lore of Buddhism. Interestingly and perhaps tellingly the material is largely phrased on classifying the motivations and appropriate responses to questions in general, rather than the explicit act of decision-making: http://www.accesstoinsight.org/index-subject.html#questions http://www.accesstoinsight.org/index-subject.html#questions There are questions that should be answered categorically [straightforwardly yes, no, this, that]. There are questions that should be answered with an analytical (qualified) answer [defining or redefining the terms]. There are questions that should be answered with a counter-question. There are questions that should be put aside. These are the four ways of answering questions.
- csense 10y agoDidn't Socrates have this figured out ~2500 years ago?