H-traits and ourside bias
Most research on intellectual humility and other h-traits focuses only on individual traits and peer-disagreement, with little attention to group membership and the inter-group conflict that so easily arises given the all-too-human tendency to form coalitions and engage in partisan competition and conflict (Van Bavel and Pereira 2018).This is problematic because the h-traits could be practiced or expressed in a partial and partisan way, which has the potential to exacerbate inter-group arrogance that manifests in “racism, sexism, ethnic hatred, religious hatred, and homophobia” (Spezio et al.
2018). For example, Brady et al. (2017) have found that moral-emotional language is especially likely to go viral in polarized networks, and that it may drive the poles further and further apart. Appealing to what is valued by the ingroup (whether it is genuinely valuable or not) may come at the cost of inter-group understanding.Thus, despite what we've just said in favor of the h-traits in relation to myside bias, we fear that they may have the opposite evaluative valence in relation to ourside bias. Recall that we have defined ourside bias as a disposition to seek out, interpret, prize, and remember information in a way that supports our side of an argument in an intergroup conflict. There are several reasons to think that someone who embodies the h-traits and spends the bulk of their time, attention, and engagement with their ingroup is especially liable to exhibit ourside bias.
First, someone is especially likely to consider those who are fellow members of their ingroup to be epistemic peers. This notion of peer-hood coupled with embodying h-traits leads to conciliatory behavior in the face of peer-disagreement, especially in cases where someone has a minority opinion compared to the rest of the ingroup. Over time, this may lead to group convergence on a set of shared opinions and evidence.
Importantly, group convergence comes out of cultivating h-traits and conciliating in a way that is often called for in the case of peerdisagreement (Christensen 2007). In light of group convergence, conciliation in the face of disagreement with members of one's outgroup is not obvious. One could argue that one's interlocutor does not qualify as a peer because of the differing group membership, or one might become steadfast in the face of the disagreement. For example, Zagzebski (2012) and Pasnau (2015) argue that self-trust is an important factor to consider in cases of peer-disagreement. They argue that there are cases where conciliating is not epistemically required because selftrust is epistemically basic. It is our contention that h-traits that cultivate ingroup conciliation, cultivate ingroup-trust. In the face of ingroup-trust, steadfastness toward outgroup members appears epistemically virtuous. Thus, the very h-traits that help people overcome myside bias set them on the path to ourside bias. More precisely, the h-traits can be expected to do this if, like most people's, the agent's social network is structured around a relatively homogeneous and homophilic ingroup.Here, one might object that treating anyone as a member of an outgroup is inconsistent with the h-traits. Perhaps the genuinely intellectually humble person agrees with the Roman poet Terence in thinking, “I am human; nothing human is alien to me.” We think that this is too extreme a constraint to put on the h-traits.Almost everyone enjoys a sense of community with a small subset of the full human population (Dunbar 1993).While cosmopolitanism of a sort is valuable, that does not mean that people should be expected not to form partial attachments, involving trust, with small groups. What is at issue, then, is how one's community of trust is formed, shaped, structured, and modified over time, as well as one's disposition toward those who are not already part of one's community. In the next section, we turn to such processes of forming, shaping, structuring, and modification.
If our arguments in this section are on the right track, they run contrary to Rini's (2017) claim that “partisanship-in-testimony-reception is sometimes compatible with epistemic virtue,” and to Levy's (2017) argument that the best thing to do in many cases is to go out of one's way to avoid testimony that one regards as prima facie fake news.Walling oneself off in an enclave of like-minded thinkers may be comfortable and cozy, but it risks aggravating ourside bias—especially in those who embody h-traits.
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