The state of current public discourse is troubling. Groups fail to listen to one another, questions go unanswered, and responses are often incomplete or unhelpful.
Even more worrisome is the degree to which people hold entrenched attitudes about complex issues that they do not understand well (Caplan, 2011; Sloman and Fernbach, 2017).The pervasive lack of intellectual humility is a barrier to productive discourse on important societal, political, and scientific issues.
But what is intellectual humility? In laying out the challenge for researchers interested in addressing this issue, the organizers of this handbook define intellectual humility as “being aware of our own cognitive limitations and biases, and being responsive to the evidence” (“John Templeton Foundation — Intellectual Humility in Public Discourse,” n.d.).We believe that in order to understand the scope of the challenge of making humans aware of their cognitive limitations, we first need to understand how human knowledge works.People use their knowledge to make sense of the world around them, deal with uncertainty, and make decisions (Craik, 1943; Long, Fernbach, and de Langhe, 2018). They assess what they think they know about objects, people, issues, environments, and processes to make many kinds ofjudgements and choices (Alba and Hutchinson 2000; Fernbach, Sloman, et al. 2013; Hadar, Sood, and Fox 2013; Heath and Tversky 1991; Long, Fernbach, and de Langhe 2018; Wood and Lynch 2002). Skilled gamblers use their knowledge of the probabilities in a game to act when they believe the game is in their favor, judges use their knowledge of law to affect appropriate legal outcomes, and campers use their knowledge of wild animals to avoid encounters with predators.This is a rational behavioral pattern: it makes good sense to call on and use as much information as possible from past experiences in order to decide on the right courses of action in subsequent situations. The discouraging news for humans is that drawing on our accumulated knowledge in order to make decisions can lead us astray because self-assessments of knowledge are frequently inaccurate (Alba and Hutchinson, 2000; Moorman, 1999).
In this chapter, we explore the topic of intellectual humility and its counterpart, overconfidence, through the lens of knowledge calibration. First, we review common examples of overconfidence and knowledge miscalibration, and explore theories of why humans often lack intellectual humility. We discuss unique challenges with respect to knowledge miscalibration, providing examples from several streams of research. We then discuss both positive and negative implications of human overconfidence, and conclude by mentioning recent work on potential interventions to increase intellectual humility, as well as opportunities for future research.
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