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You Are Not So Smart
322 - Intellectual Humility - Tenelle Porter
01:07:58
Can intellectual humility be measured? What influences it and affects it, limits it and enhances it? What even is it, scientifically speaking? We explore all of this and then play an episode of How to Be A Better Human featuring psychologist Tenelle Porter telling comedian Chris Duffy how she is researching how to conduct better research into intellectual humility.
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- [00:02]
David McRaney
For years everyone thought Verizon had the best network because they did. But now the best mobile network in the US is T Mobile. T Mobile's network has the most advanced 5G with more towers and their signal reaches further than ever. So you can text an insta talk and say, you won't believe where I am.
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Chris Duffy
T Mobile has the best mobile network in the US based on analysis by.
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David McRaney
Ookla of speed test intelligence data 1H2025CT mobile.com network. You can go to kittedkitted shop and use the code Smart50Smart50 at checkout and you will get half off a set of thinking superpowers in a box. If you want to know more about what I'm talking about, check it out. Middle of the show.
- [01:02]
Tenille Porter
Copy.
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Chris Duffy
They went quiet.
- [01:13]
David McRaney
Welcome to the you are not so smart podcast. Episode 322 Science is more than a body of knowledge. It's a way of thinking, a way of skeptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility. This is the you're not so Smart podcast. I am David McRaney, and that was the late great astronomer and science communicator Carl Sagan talking about intellectual humility. And if you've been listening to this show for a while, you are well aware of the fact that the concept of intellectual humility and our lack thereof, the scientific study of intellectual humility and our lack thereof, is one of the main themes of the show. So in this episode, after I tell you some really neat things about intellectual humility, I will play you an episode of another podcast called how to be a Better Human, in which a psychologist who studies intellectual humility named Tenille Porter tells comedian Chris Duffy all about her latest research into how to conduct research into intellectual humility. But before I hit play on all that, I'd like to take a moment to talk about this fascinating and often misunderstood term you just heard from Pulitzer Prize winning astronomer and planetary scientist Carl Sagan. Here's the Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman also talking about intellectual humility.
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Richard Feynman
I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I'm not absolutely sure of anything. And there are many things I don't know anything about, but I don't have to know an answer I don't have. I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell. Possibly it doesn't frighten me.
- [03:47]
David McRaney
And here is the award winning journalist, Farrah Nasser.
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Farrah Nasser
We all think we're right, and that's dangerous. A recent survey by Ipsos shows that 69% of Canadians believe that the average person lives in a bubble on the Internet. Yet only 31% of us think this about ourselves. So that means we're surrounding ourselves by like minded individuals, with like minded individuals, both either at the other end of a keyboard or in person. And we're shedding out people with whose opinions we may not agree. We're creating a silo, right? What happens in a world where we lack intellectual humility? In a world where we all think we're right?
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David McRaney
We get angry. Okay, so what is this thing, intellectual humility? Well, we usually take the psychological frame whenever we're discussing things on this podcast. And when psychologists use this term, intellectual humility, it means the degree to which you recognize, accept and willingly admit the limitations of your cognitive abilities. So what does that mean? Well, to be intellectually humble is to embrace the likelihood that on any, any topic, big or small, you might be wrong about some or all the things you believe, feel and assume, thanks to an assortment of biases, fallacies and heuristics. And intellectual humility requires an understanding that the word wrong can mean many things. Acknowledging the possibility of your wrongness could describe admitting the beliefs you hold in high certainty could be false, or the attitudes you currently hold might be founded on poor or incomplete evidence. Or the opinions you routinely share could be biased and very well could change if someone were to present you with good arguments to their contrary. Complicating matters, and we're going to do that a lot in this episode, is the fact that we often feel like we are well aware of all of these things. But the research into intellectual humility reveals that though we may think of ourselves as open to new ideas and perspectives and conscious of our individual levels of ignorance from subject to subject, we tend to approach most situations with an undeserved overconfidence in our understanding. For instance, in a study by Leonid Rosenblit and Frank keel back in 2011, researchers asked participants to rate how well they understood the mechanics of everyday things like zippers, toilets and locks. People usually rated themselves as having a pretty good grasp of how such things worked. But when asked to provide detailed, step by step explanations, most could not do that. And that fact came as a surprise to the people who previously believed they could do those things provide step by step explanations? Explain it in detail. Psychologists call this the illusion of explanatory depth, the belief you understand something better than you truly do. It's a cognitive bias, one of more than 180 we've identified so far, and each of these reliably skews your perceptions and affects your judgments from one moment to the next. This one in particular. The illusion of explanatory depth. It leaves you overconfident in your understanding of most things and thus unmotivated to truly understand them until one day your zipper will not zip, your toilet will not flush, and you can't figure out why. Later studies have revealed the illusion of explanatory depth extends well beyond zippers and toilets and bicycles and helicopters and coffee makers. For instance, when researchers asked for people's opinions on topics like healthcare reform or carbon taxes, people tended to produce strong, emotionally charged positions. But when asked to explain those issues in detail, most realized they had only a basic grasp, and as a result, their certainty dipped and their opinions became less extreme. But that doesn't often happen. You don't often get that question right to your face. Please explain that thing that you feel very strongly about in detail. And studies like these reveal we have a rather complicated relationship with our own ignorance. We tend to discover our incomprehension by surprise, sideswiped from our blind spots because we were unaware those blind spots existed. For the most part. That's because we rarely go looking for evidence of our ignorance unless motivated to do so. And when motivated to do so, we often try to prove to ourselves that we were right all along, especially when we feel like we have a pretty good grasp of what is and is not. So over the years, I've learned a lot of things that required me to unlearn a lot of other things before I could add the new things I learned to the collection of things I thought I knew for sure. For instance, I used to believe the 1938 radio broadcast of the War of the Worlds led to a mass panic. But it did not. Rumors of such a panic spread via newspaper think pieces at the time about how getting news from anywhere other than newspapers was a bad idea. I also used to believe you could boil a frog, a live frog, by slowly and gradually raising the temperature of the water it was in. It turns out that is not true. They jump right out once they become uncomfortable. I also used to believe lemmings sometimes marched off cliffs because they blindly followed each other while walking in a single file. And that one's been A nugget of popular but untrue folklore since the 1800s, long before the 1990s video game that perpetuated the myth with its whimsical gameplay, and the 1950s Disney documentary that did the same by tossing an unsettling number of real lemmings off of a cliff. In each case, right up until the moment I received evidence to the contrary, all this misinformation, these supposed facts, felt true to me. I had believed them for decades, and I had accepted them in part because they seemed to confirm all sorts of other ideas and opinions floating around in my mind. Plus, they would have been great ways to illustrate complicated concepts if not for the pesky fact that they were, in fact, not facts. That's one of the reasons why common misconceptions and false beliefs like these spread from conversation to conversation and survive from generation to generation to become anecdotal currency in our marketplace of ideas. They confirm our assumptions and validate our opinions, and thus they raise few skeptical alarms. They make sense, and they help us make sense of other things. And as Carl Jung once wrote, the pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong. Which is another thing that I used to believe until right before recording this, I discovered Carl Jung, in fact, never said those things. It turns out I was wrong. Which brings me back to the topic at hand. Intellectual humility. It's a fun term to say intellectual humility. It somewhat ironically sounds fancy and smart and something an educated person who is not all that humble would utter in reference to something another not all that humble, educated person just referenced over a tincture of absinthe or something. In reality, it's a very simple concept, at least on the surface. But then again, so is everything. So, ironically, to proceed with intellectual humility is to assume that everything is more complicated than it first appears introduced, including intellectual humility. So, with that in mind, let's take a look at this idea one word at a time. Intellectual. The word means something that is in the domain of the intellect. And the intellect is an abstract term and catch all word slash, concept, related in the Old Latin to intelligence, which itself is related to the concept of understanding. And understanding is a word that truly originally meant to stand under among something, but metaphorically, as in to be close to it, underneath its shadow, near that which is throwing the shadow. And in terms of a thing that has meaning to stand under, to understand it is to comprehend it, to grasp the idea of it. So intellect is an umbrella term, concept and category for all the Stuff that feels like understanding and knowing things, but also thinking things and thinking about thinking, and also thinking about thinking about thinking. It's everything that might fall into a conceptual bucket related to using the mind to make sense of stuff both real and imagined, both physical and mental. In that bucket are concepts like reasoning, both the philosophical kind and the psychological kind, and the latter, the psychological kind. It's just coming up with reasons and justifications and rationalizations and arguments and opinions. Intellect includes all that, plus making plans and building mental models and agreeing upon definitions and so on, all those things. But it is also understanding or attempting to understand all those things, especially in the abstract, which is to say, using words that aren't exactly concrete in the way a word like banana is pretty concrete because it refers to a thing that seems to truly exist outside of the mind, something that two people could point at. Thinking in the abstract isn't like pointing at a banana. It's thinking about things, using words about things that exist mostly in the mind, like reason and truth and justice and beauty and bravery and kindness and ownership, wisdom, intelligence, intellect, and, yes, that which is intellectual. Okay, so that's intellectual. The other word, humility, comes from a very old word in Proto Indo European. That's the language family that preceded many, many modern languages, like English and German and French and so on. And that very old word was the term for the earth, as in the ground and dirt and all things, dirt, like, and earth in. At some point, that became the word hummus in Latin, which also meant all those things. So to be humble was to be on the ground metaphorically, which is to say low in rank, in a system of things that are ranked. Taken further metaphorically, it came to mean meek and modest and not egotistical or boastful or braggadocious or performative. Humility as an idea, as a concept, later evolved as a metaphorical category and became an abstract term for remaining unbothered by the fact that you aren't the best at everything or even most things. To be humble and to carry yourself with humility came to mean that you accept you are not a God or a demigod. And taken to the extreme, you aren't even a particularly fantastic human in all regards. Therefore, intellectual humility requires you to accept and be unbothered by the fact that there are things you do not know and that there are things you do not understand. And then the next level of intellectual humility is to accept and be unbothered by the fact that your opinions are changeable. The things you believe might be Wrong. And the attitudes you hold might be the result of experiences you've had. And if you have new experiences, those attitudes might be different. Then full and true and total intellectual humility is to recognize that you use a brain to make sense of the world. And that brain has limitations and biases that make you inherently fallible. That fallibility is biological, and that biology generates your mind and your memories and your emotions, and it can lead to all sorts of wrongness, moral, ethical, factual, attitudinal, behavioral, and more. So, to be intellectually humble is to understand that the things you assume you understand may not be truly understood. And the things you think, think, feel, believe and do are always worth reconsidering, especially when you encounter new experiences and information and interactions with other brains that challenge and or contradict your current understanding, your current assumptions, and your current concepts of what is and is not. So to be intellectually humble is to accept that you are the unreliable narrator in all the stories you tell yourself about yourself and about others and about the world in general. And then if you want to go even deeper, you can. And if you want to get even weirder, you so can. Okay, the deep weird level. Science as a word comes from a Latin verb, scientia, which means to know. It came from an older word which meant to divide into parts. And that same word gave us words like incision and schism. Scientia is another words like conscience. Conscience to know your own conduct and omni science to know everything that can be known and pre science to know beforehand. You can be conscientious. You can imagine a being that is omniscient, and you can kind of sorta as a person, be prescient, which is to say you can know something is going to be true before it is a thing that has become true. For instance, if you plug the best observations and calculations we have concerning the star at the center of our solar system into a computer, you can then quote, unquote, no, it will one day swell into a red giant and swallow the earth. That is decidedly prescient because it isn't a prediction. A prediction would be a maybe. Prescience is certainty. It's knowing. Which leads me to a fun word I hope you add to your vocabulary, niscience. To be nisient is to not know something that can't be known, ever. At least not by you. It's not even knowing that you can't know it. For instance, your cat. Your cat can't read or understand the terms and conditions for Spotify. So if your Cat clicked on. I agree. Before signing up for the service. We wouldn't consider that binding. There are vast expanses of ignorance your cat can't even imagine and could never gain the knowledge required to rid itself of that ignorance. That's the definition of nisience. At least that's the one I prefer. Because once you accept this definition applies to cat knowledge, you can begin to wonder about parallels in human knowledge. Are there some things that, just like your cat, you can never know? That you can never know? Are there things that maybe no human can ever understand because our bounded rationality is limited in ways that would require a more complex and powerful mind making thing than the human brain to comprehend? Are there levels of understanding in domains like physics that are as distant from human understanding as. As the human level of understanding of watchmaking is to orangutans? I think I pronounced that correctly. Orangutan. Orangutans. Orangutan. It's fun stuff. I'd like to think that we've got the capacity to understand quite a bit and that the universe is mostly comprehensible to us, given enough study, enough dividing into parts, enough science. But it is with great intellectual humility that I must accept that this is merely an assumption on my part. I don't know what I don't know about knowing things. In my experience. I will say that this never really bothers scientists the way it seems to bother the rest of us, the way it seems to bother people whose worldviews require an unyielding certainty. It certainly doesn't bother scientists as much as it bothers people who have found themselves within ideological and tribal identity extremes like cult members or conspiracy theorists or religious zealots or polarized political reactionaries. Also, in my experience, the most intellectually humble people in the world are scientists because every single time they read a new paper, it requires them to fully engage in intellectual humility, especially in their own areas of expertise. Every experiment they run is an exercise in intellectual humility. If they start to stray from that, other scientists will notice and let them know, and then they'll let everyone else know. The fall from grace for refusing to accept you might be wrong in science is a career threatening plummet. Science, the institution works because unlike politics and business, the people in scientific institutions will shame and ostracize their peers for not accepting evidence that calls into question their prior assumptions. The primate part of us that is ultrasocial and cares a whole lot about what other people think of us. Science repurposed that to maintain a culture where One's reputation depends on constantly pursuing and demonstrating and proselytizing intellectual humility.
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Richard Feynman
I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.
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David McRaney
This all reminds me of the work of Carl Sagan. Science is more than a body of knowledge, it's a way of thinking. Sagan was maybe the greatest science communicator of all time. He's definitely up there with people like James Burke and Alan Alda and the rest. He was an astronomer and planetary scientist who won the Pulitzer Prize for one of his books and created the Emmy award winning and Peabody Award winning television series Cosmos, which was at its core, all about the amazing things we have done and can do as a species when we place intellectual humility as among our highest values. In his book the Demon Haunted World, he wrote that none of us come fully equipped. And he urged us to develop our skills of both skepticism and curiosity. He wrote a lot about that balance. He wrote, quote, it seems to me that what is called for is an exquisite balance between two conflicting needs, the most skeptical scrutiny of all hypothes that are served up to us, and at the same time, a great openness to new ideas. In Cosmos, he said, we must balance skepticism and openness. Skepticism so that we are not gullible, openness so that we are not dismissive of new truths. And in his book Broca's Brain, he wrote, science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge. Its tenets are not absolute truths, but working hypotheses, constantly refined by skepticism, by openness to new ideas, by curiosity about the universe as it is. So yes, remember, remain open to the fact you may be wrong, but do so without losing your grip on the tools of evidence, collection of reason and inquiry. Investigate the world with a method that works. Some of my favorites are the Socratic method, which is for any topic, any answer, you can always ask deeper and deeper questions until you arrive at ignorance. And of course, the scientific method, which is thinking in terms of. Every supposed certainty is a hypothesis, and no hypothesis is scientific unless new evidence could potentially prove it false. Those two are the peanut butter and chocolate of critical thinking. But there's also Bayesian reasoning, which is believing in terms of probabilities and then updating those probabilities each time you encounter new evidence and new experiences and new perspectives. Basically, Bayesian reasoning says no belief is ever final, only more or less probable. And then there's stuff like dialectical reasoning, which allows two things to be true and be conflicting. To think in dialectics is to consider combining a thesis and its antithesis into a synthesis. Because many times a contradiction isn't a case of one thing is wrong and one thing is right, but there's a deeper truth for which the current model that you're using can't account. And then here's a fun one, hermeneutics, which is the idea that your priors will affect your understanding, and then that new understanding will affect your priors, and those new priors will affect your new understanding, and on and on until you really need to take a few steps back and then a few steps more. Taking steps back from the way you're seeing things to seeing how you're seeing things, and then seeing how you're seeing how you're seeing things. Thinking about thinking about thinking. There are many tools for doing this, for metacognition, and that's intellectual humility. And to sum all of this up, as psychologist Teneo Porter puts it, intellectual humility is a metacognitive ability to recognize the limitations of one's beliefs and knowledge. End quote. And after this break, you will hear an episode of the podcast how to Be a Better human, in which Dr. Porter tells comedian Chris Duffy all about her research into how to conduct research into intellectual humility. All that right after this. I don't mean to interrupt your meal, but I saw you from across a cafe and you're the Geico Gecko, right? In the flesh. Oh, my goodness. This is huge. To finally meet you. I love Geico's fast and friendly claim service.
- [29:17]
Tenille Porter
Well, that's how Geico gets 97 customer satisfaction.
- [29:20]
David McRaney
Anyway, that's all. Enjoy the rest of your food. No worries.
- [29:25]
Tenille Porter
So are you just gonna watch me eat?
- [29:27]
David McRaney
Oh, sorry, just a little starstruck. I'll be on my way. If you're gonna stick around, just pull up a chair. You're the best.
- [29:34]
Chris Duffy
Get more than just savings. Get more with Geico. Welcome to Only Murders in the Building, the official podcast. Join me, Michael Cyril Creighton, as we go behind the scenes with some of the amazing actors, writers and crew from season five. The audience should never stop suspecting anything.
- [29:50]
David McRaney
How can you not be funny crawling.
- [29:52]
Chris Duffy
Around on a coffin? Catch Only Murders in the Building official podcast now streaming wherever you get your podcasts. And watch Only Murders in the Building streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney plus for bundle subscribers terms apply.
- [30:07]
David McRaney
The School of Thought. I love this place. I've been a fan of the School of Thought for years. It's a non profit organization. They provide free Creative Commons critical thinking resources to more than 30 million people worldwide and their mission is to help popularize critical thinking, reason, media literacy, scientific literacy, and a desire to understand things deeply via intellectual humility. So you can see why I would totally be into something like this. The founders of the School of Thought have just launched something new called Kitted Thinking Tools K I T T E D Thinking Tools and the way this works is you go to the website, you pick out the kit that you want, there's tons of them and the School of Thought will send you a kit of very nice, beautifully designed, well curated, high quality. Each one about double the size of a playing Card, Matte Cello 400 GSM stock prompt cards and a nice magnetically latching box that you can use to facilitate workshops, level up brainstorming and creative thinking sessions, optimize user and customer experience and design, elevate strategic planning and decision making, mitigate risks and liabilities, and much, much more. Each kit can, if you want to use it this way, interact with this crazy cool app. Each card has a corresponding digital version with examples and templates and videos and step by step instructions and more. You even get PowerPoint and Keynote templates. There's so many ways you could use this. Here's some ideas. If you're a venture capital investor, you could get the Investors Critical Thinking Kit and use it to stress test and evaluate different startups for Series A funding. If you're a User Experience designer, you can get the User Design Kit to put together a workshop with internal stakeholders for a software product. Or if you're an HR professional, you could mix and match these kits to create a complete professional development learning program tailored specifically for your team over the course of the next two years. So if you're the kind of person who is fascinated with critical thinking and motivated reasoning and intellectual humility and biases, fallacies and heuristics, you know, the sort of person who listens to podcasts like you are not so smart. You're probably the kind of person who would love these decks. If you're curious, you can get a special 50% off offer. That's right, half off offer right here. You can get half half off of one of these kits by heading to Kitted Shop K I T T E D Shop and using the code smart50 at checkout. That's smart50 at checkout. 5% of the profits will go back to the School of Thought. So you're supporting a good cause that distributes free critical thinking Tools all over the world on top of receiving a set of thinking superpowers in a box. Check all of this out at Kitted Shop or just click the link in the show notes. And now we return to our program. I'm David McRaney. This is the youe Are not so Smart podcast. And what follows is an episode of the podcast how to Be a Better Human.
- [33:26]
Chris Duffy
You're listening to how to Be a Better Human. I am your host, Chris Duffy. One thing about me is that no one has ever accused me of having a small head. I have a big head. Both literally in that I have trouble finding hats that fit, and figuratively in that I think that I should stand on stage and have audiences of strangers listen to me talk. And I host a podcast called how to Be a Better Human. Humility. Not really my strongest soon. Today's guest, Tenille Porter, is a professor and a researcher who studies humility. She's an important person for me to talk to, but Tennille studies a very specific kind of humility, intellectual humility. And that's actually a term that I had never heard of before meeting her, and now it's one that I cannot stop thinking about. Intellectual humility seems to me like it is the key piece that is missing from so many conversations in the world today. It really feels like this is something that more people need to know about. And here's how Tenille defines intellectual humility.
- [34:23]
Tenille Porter
Intellectual humility means understanding what you don't know and recognizing that you might be wrong. Of course, all of us think that we're right, and sometimes we are right. But that feeling of being right is a subjective experience, and it doesn't always match reality. So intellectual humility is really about understanding that our knowledge is partial, that nobody knows everything there is to know, and therefore we sometimes get things wrong.
- [34:58]
Chris Duffy
If there's one thing that I'm a pro at, it is getting things wrong. Now, I think we did get something right when we booked Tenille on the show today, and I'm so excited that we're going to get to talk to her about why knowing that you get things wrong is one of the most important things. Things that you can get right.
- [35:14]
Tenille Porter
Hi, I'm Dr. Tenille Porter, and I am an assistant professor of psychology at Rowan University.
- [35:21]
Chris Duffy
So, Tenille, let's start with the fact that you study intellectual humility. That is something that I think many people are probably not familiar with. But I wonder if you have, like, a specific example that can illustrate this for people.
- [35:33]
Tenille Porter
Yeah, I can think of one Recently So I was taken an international flight. So I was flying to England on a red eye. I got settled into my seat. I was in a window seat. And we were just about done with boarding. The last few people were coming on, and a woman came on the plane and kind of stood outside my row and said, you're in my seat. And I said, no, I'm not. I'm in 34A. And then the woman in the middle seat said, well, I'm in 33B. And then it was just very clear that, oh, I'm in the wrong seat. I was totally wrong. I'm so sorry. Let me get up. And everybody has to get up. And you may not have had that experience of something so simple, of getting into the wrong seat on a plane, but every single person has had that experience of being, like, totally wrong about something because we're humans. And that's part of what it is to be human.
- [36:39]
Chris Duffy
It also seems to me like this is a field of study that I would have imagined was kind of intellectually interesting in the past and now feels, like, directly relevant to our everyday lives and survival of our species and societies.
- [36:57]
Tenille Porter
So holding space for the possibility that we might be wrong is not a new idea. It's been with us for a really long time. Scientists have written about it for thousands of years. Philosophers have written about it as something that we ought to be doing to have a good life. I think what's new now is that we're trying or starting to study it scientifically, but it, of course, has bearing in so many different contexts and domains.
- [37:28]
Chris Duffy
How do you study this scientifically?
- [37:30]
Tenille Porter
We try to measure intellectual humility, or we try to do experiments that will kind of change how intellectually humble people are or feel comfortable being in a certain context. So people take a questionnaire. Right now, I'm working on a different kind of measure where we're actually going to take high school students and ask them what they think about cell phone bans. So should they be allowed to have their cell phones in classes? Lots of high school students have really strong opinions on this issue, as you might imagine. And instead of asking them to say, how humble do you think you are about this issue? We're going to ask them to actually engage with perspectives that don't agree with them with theirs. So how many reasons from a student who disagrees with you on this would you want to read? And we'll look at their behavior on this computer task and use that to measure how intellectually humble they are.
- [38:29]
Chris Duffy
Are there ages or phases where we are more intellectually humble? Or is it kind of one of those things where we have this moment at the beginning of our lives and then afterwards we just have to really work hard to become humble again?
- [38:42]
Tenille Porter
It's interesting we're trying to learn about that still. So there's stuff that we don't know about that yet. But sometimes if you ask a 4 year old, how much do you know about trucks or how much do you know about this really why frogs look the way they do, a four year old is going to say, I know everything about that. I know everything. But as kids, and just like you're saying, and I know you're a teacher, as kids get into school, they start to get better at calibrating how much they know and how much they don't know and they become more accurate. And that accuracy is sort of like a nice trajectory that keeps getting higher and higher as they go through school. So they're getting better at it. And there's this idea too that with teenagers that like, oh, this must be a period when the humility hits the floor. Like, I don't even know if they're capable of being humble. That's not really what we see. Actually, if you look at all the data, teenagers aren't any more narcissistic than anybody else. So they're actually a little bit better than super young kids at knowing what they know and what they don't know and then thinking about the whole lifespan. Yeah. Something that I've seen in my data is that sometimes as people get older, they're more intellectually humble. It's almost like with experience you really come to just appreciate this fact of being a human being, which is that, you know, to be human is to err. We're all fallible.
- [40:15]
Chris Duffy
What is the opposite of intellectual humility? Is there a term for that?
- [40:19]
Tenille Porter
The opposite of intellectual humility is intellectual rigidity. That's like extreme certainty. But I think that what you're saying here also makes me think that. It sort of makes me think about the interaction between confidence and humility. It's like this idea that can you be confident and intellectually humble at the same time? And I think that the answer is yes. And I think that for a lot of people, you even have to have a certain amount of confidence to be able to show intellectual humility. It's like, I'm so confident that I'm willing to be vulnerable in this way that I am wrong or I don't understand that or something. I don't know what that is. Tell me more about that.
- [41:05]
Chris Duffy
Yeah, it makes me think too, speaking to you right now, Tenille, you are a professor who is able to explain your work in a way that I think anyone would really be able to understand. And I think that I've talked to a lot of scientists and professors. Weirdly, I've had a career where I've interviewed a lot of scientists and professors. And I always think that that's really like a mark of confidence. Right. Of confidence in your work and in your mastery of the field. Because it's really easy in academia to hide behind jargon, hide behind, you know, complex ways of saying simple things and making it so, like, well, you couldn't possibly understand. Because I've done all this research and I've done so many years of schooling to say something that, you know, someone else could understand if you said it more simply. But sometimes people hide behind that. And I think that is like a lack of confidence in themselves and in the research.
- [41:54]
Tenille Porter
Yeah, well, that's a great compliment. That's the best compliment that I've received.
- [41:58]
Chris Duffy
I also think even putting the confidence or competence aside, it's so much more pleasant to be with someone who can just say, I actually don't know, rather than saying like, you know, giving a five minute monologue to obscure the fact that they don't know is never a fun conversation.
- [42:13]
Tenille Porter
Agreed. And I think something we're seeing with intellectual humility is that it's one of these things that does really help relationships. I was listening to something the other day, and it was about this test that you can ask on a first date. It's a test via a question you can ask someone, do you believe in ghosts? And the whole program I was listening to is about how the answer to this question will tell you a lot about the person. So if they answer like, no, absolutely not, I do not believe in ghosts. And there's no information that you could ever provide to me to show me that ghosts are real. They're like, really rigid. You're learning something that this is going to be a kind of black and white thinking person. But if, like, I don't actually believe in ghosts right now, but if, like, potentially maybe you could show me something to convince me that ghosts are real, I would change my belief. Like, this is a marker of intellectual humility.
- [43:11]
Chris Duffy
When you think about intellectual humility in that way, which is that you can be really rigid on one side or really rigid on the other, but then somewhere in the middle is this more flexible, intellectually humble state. For me, at least a very Natural comparison that that brings up is political beliefs or this spectrum of, like, what must be true. And it feels to me like we are in a. A cultural moment where there's very little cultural capital in having flexibility and there's quite a lot of rewards and cultural pressure to be rigid in your beliefs.
- [43:51]
Tenille Porter
Yeah, I think that. I do feel that. I think that. I especially feel that in online settings, social media interactions, or I think that when it comes to interacting face to face, that we're not as sort of dogmatic and rigid as we appear online. And what this makes me think is to what extent we need big cultural shifts or big context that can support intellectual humility for it to really thrive. I think that changing some of those environments would be really impactful.
- [44:30]
Chris Duffy
So, like, what could a regular person do to create more environments for intellectual humility to thrive both in themselves and also in the interactions they have?
- [44:41]
Tenille Porter
This is what I try to do. I try to model intellectual humility as a teacher. It really sets its own for students and it really licenses them to be able to express that uncertainty or just take a risk to admit. I don't know what that means. When I have said, I know a lot about this topic, but I don't know everything there is to know, or you actually know this thing that I don't know. So you can help me understand that. I think that especially when we're in those positions, I don't know if of power or influence like a teacher in a classroom that can be really powerful in setting the tone for that whole context.
- [45:21]
Chris Duffy
Going back to teenagers, because you brought up teenagers before. I know you did a really important study on intellectual humility with teens. I feel like that same thing is a real skill that many people are learning in teenage years, which is that there are different paths, things that aren't necessarily, like, all black and white, and that you're figuring out what your story is versus what other people's story are and whether you want to be part of the group or want to be separate from the group. That's like a big piece of at least my experience with teenage years. And it felt like people around me. Can you talk to us both what you did with the study on teenagers and then also why you picked that particular age?
- [46:02]
Tenille Porter
I'll start with the second one. I pick that particular age because I care about teenagers. I worked with teenagers when I was in college as a youth mentor. And it's just the stage of life that I think is really challenging and really rich. So much is happening that it fascinated me. I also think it was just a really important time in my own life. Like, some of the most formative, just, like, core values and beliefs that I have, I think were forged in adolescence and young adulthood. So there's this idea out there that maybe at this time of life when you need to be separating from your parents and, like, making it, like, kind of breaking out on your own and you have this really strong urge to break out on your own, then maybe what you need is, like, a really extreme, like, confidence and kind of, like a stridency to help you make that difficult transition. Like, this is the way it is. Like, this is gonna help me break out. That's one story that we tell ourselves about teenagerhood. Another story that's possible is like, well, maybe it helps teenagers to be a little bit more flexible and open and intellectually humble about what they believe. Either one of those could be true. So I was curious, would, you know what. What would intellectual humility in a teenager actually do to them? Would it make their lives worse, or would it make their lives better? Or somewhere in between? We looked at it in school. Graduating from high school is one of these really important milestones. And it looks like from the data, to set you up to be on a path to have a longer life and a healthier life. So succeeding in school is pretty important for kids at this age. So we wanted to know, would intellectual humility relate at all to how successful they were in school? And we found intellectually humbler teenagers were. Were doing better in school, they were learning more, and they were more kind of persistent. So if they got negative feedback or a bad test grade, they were like, okay, I'm not giving up. Like, I'm going to redouble. Figure out, like, change code, whatever, figure out what's going on and try harder next time. They were more receptive to feedback. So say they get some negative feedback on an essay or something. They're like, that could be a good point. And they're more likely to kind of incorporate that feedback and a revision going forward. And all this culminates in earning higher grades, which is a marker of learning. So in a word, the intellectually humbler teenagers were learning more, seemed to help them in school. So that's. That's, like, one study. I'm not sure if there's other.
- [48:53]
Chris Duffy
No, that's great. That's really helpful. And are there anything, any findings that you found about intellectual humility that have really surprised you because they've been counterintuitive?
- [49:01]
Tenille Porter
Maybe One thing is that that's kind of surprising is that. So we could think about intellectual humility as something that's happening in your head and something that you can also show to the world. So I can be aware that I don't know something. But am I going to admit that to you? Like, something that is surprising to me is that we see sometimes if you're really, really, like, turned way up in terms of how aware you are of the stuff that you don't know, that can actually make you a lot less willing to show that to other people, actually may make you a lot more nervous about expressing what you don't know. So it's getting into this question of what is intellectual humility and what's the opposite of it? At one end of the extreme, the opposite is something like rigidity, too much certainty. But there's another extreme we could talk about, which is like, too much obsessing over what you don't know and getting kind of stuck in, mired down with all of the limitations. And that's also not a good place. That's not really virtuous. It's not really helpful. It's just like an overactive attention to limitations.
- [50:25]
Chris Duffy
And I imagine it stops you from. It really can prevent you from taking any sort of action because you're like, well, I know that I don't know everything and maybe I don't know enough, so I shouldn't actually do this thing. I should stop and get more feedback and do more research. And, you know, you never get. You. You'll never know it all. So maybe you just never do anything.
- [50:42]
Tenille Porter
Exactly. In my family, we like to call this analysis paralysis. When it comes to intellectual humility at any age, what we want is the balance between something that is super rigid and something that is, like, super uncertain. We're trying to find something that's well calibrated.
- [51:07]
Chris Duffy
If you go to a conference, like when you go to, like, an academic conference on intellectual humility, is it just everyone presenting and being like, well, I. I'm not sure about this, but I might be wrong. But you.
- [51:17]
David McRaney
I.
- [51:17]
Chris Duffy
Here's an idea that I have. Is it just people, like, everyone's hedging their bets constantly and not actually saying a definitive statement because they're not positive that their research is actually totally sound?
- [51:27]
Tenille Porter
It's interesting that you should say that because I have had the experience of presenting on intellectual humility to people who don't study it, and I do think it has an effect on the audience. Such they become nicer, their questions are kinder, they're a little bit like, it puts them in this frame of mind that's like, remember, you don't know everything and you might be wrong. So I really have experienced that. I do think it has an effect.
- [51:53]
Chris Duffy
You have a wonderful podcast voice. You also have a way of speaking that I'm wondering is if it's a chicken or an egg thing where it feels very intellectually humble in that you, like, are thoughtful and you consider your words. You're not just like rapid fire spraying words out there like I am. And I wonder if that is. Do you feel that you've started to think and speak differently as you learned more about intellectual humility, or do you think that you always were kind of a thoughtful, choosing your words speaker, and then that is maybe partly why you were drawn to this in the first place?
- [52:24]
Tenille Porter
I think it's both. I think it's both. And I think I was drawn to it. I've always been a thoughtful kind of careful. But it's way more like, way more. Since studying this, I will say something. And then I'm like, do I really believe that? Is that really true? Huh? I'm not. You know, maybe I could see it from this other point of view.
- [52:47]
Chris Duffy
Are there ways to encourage intellectual humility in others without saying outright, you should have more intellectual humility.
- [52:55]
Tenille Porter
You have got to practice what you preach. So intellectual for me first, and then intellectual humility for the. So if you really want your brother who disagrees with you about politics to show intellectual humility to you, try showing it to him first and see what happens. It's not a guarantee, but it's going to work a lot better than yelling at him to be more humble. Yeah, I would have really loved it if on the plane when I was in the wrong seat, I would have been proven right. It was very painful to be that person who had to stand up and make everyone stand up and walk the road behind. I think naturally it feels better. But as I'm saying this. So this is the intellectual humility thing kicking in. So there's a psychologist named Frank Kyle who's also studied intellectual humility. And I remember at a talk once, somebody was saying this, but I just feel so bad when I'm wrong. I shouldn't have to feel good to learn that I'm wrong. And Frank was like, it's great to learn that I'm wrong. I've learned something new. What a wonderful thing. I just discovered something new. This is learning. This is so exciting. And so maybe there are people out there who have reframed it in a way that it is discovery. And maybe if we could all do that, a little bit more intellectual humility might become a little easier.
- [54:29]
Chris Duffy
Framing also makes me think about how a lot of these skills that are uncomfortable or painful at first are in some ways muscles that you can strengthen them and they get better. I just think about for myself, one of the things that people ask the most frequently when they find out that I perform standup comedy is, oh, my God, have you ever bombed? Of course I've bombed. Some audiences would say that I've never stopped bombing. But what really has changed is like when you first perform and you get up there and you think you're gonna say something funny and you say it and no one laughs. That first time is excruciating. It is so horrible. It's this real death of the ego. But if you're gonna keep doing comedy, over time it gets easier because you've done it. So, you know, okay, I survive. And even though it's uncomfortable and awkward, it's mortifying for a day or for a week, but it goes away, the feeling of like, that shame after doing it. And now I'm not gonna say it's like this every time, but a lot of times if I tell a joke and it does not get any reaction from the audience, that is actually really just helpful information for me. Like, oh, something's not working about that. It's not information about me as a person. It's not like, you're a terrible, disgusting, horrible human and you're horrible at your job. It's like, okay, maybe I worded that badly or maybe I didn't give enough context, or maybe I'm just wrong that this is a universal thing that people can relate to. Like, there's. There's some information there that I can take away, I imagine, without everyone being stand up comedians. There's similar exposure therapy or work and muscles and practice that you can do to feel like accepting your limitations or your intellectual limits isn't as painful as it is at first.
- [56:09]
Tenille Porter
I think that's absolutely right. And I believe pretty strongly that intellectual humility is really malleable. It is one of these things that we can develop through practice. I have met people who have really strong intuitions in the other direction. The idea that, well, people are. Some people are kind of born this way and other people aren't, and there's just nothing we can do about it. But this is one of those places where I'm going to stick to my conviction that training this is really possible and worthwhile and if we can't learn, then we just end up being stuck where we currently are. And it's really exciting to push forward and progress and learn something new.
- [57:01]
Chris Duffy
So thinking about this, what are some things that people can do to build intellectual humility in themselves or to practice it in their daily lives?
- [57:08]
Tenille Porter
Yes, great question. Okay, what can they do? I'm like, so much of my research is like about what can other people do to help other people develop it, or what does it do when you have it. But okay, here's one, here's one thing you can try to build, intellectual humility. If you find yourself in a conflict and you see things differently than somebody else, you just disagree, take a step back, just remove yourself from the situation and then imagine looking back on this situation from 20 years in the future. Or imagine that you are a fly on the wall watching this play out. Get some distance from the situation and then try to re approach it. So this idea of like, when we get a little bit of perspective, it often just opens us up a little bit to intellectual humility. So that's one thing you can try. Another thing you can try to build intellectual humility is just remind yourself of the benefits of being this way. There's a lot in our culture that says intellectual humility is not good. It makes you look weak, it's not going to help you. But there's also a lot in our culture that says, no, this is, this is a good way to be. This is a really good way to connect with other people. This is a good way to learn something new. This is an honest way to be. Because we are humans and no one is infallible. So remember the benefits. 3. If you're finding yourself in a place where you're, you're really struggling to communicate, like see eye to eye with another person or even listen to them, you can just like take a moment, again, remove yourself and just reflect on your values. Like, what are some values that are really important to you? This is a technique that's used in brief interventions. It's also used in intensive psychotherapy, values and action therapy, and that kind of grounding in your values. And lots of people will say, like, my connections with friends and family are really important to me. Just a way of just getting in touch with what's important. It kind of anchors the self so that you're feeling in a way more secure to go back into that interaction and be able to listen to what the other person has to say without feeling really threatened and needing to protect and defend yourself. Okay, the Fourth one, I'd say is to put yourself into a kind of growth mindset. So this is this idea that growth and change are possible and good. You can grow in understanding. The other person can also change and grow in understanding. So believing the other person can change is helpful. But this kind of, like, emphasis on growth is something that we've learned, helps people embrace intellectual humility.
- [59:55]
Chris Duffy
I imagine a lot of people who are parents, if they're listening to this, would. Would say, like, oh, well, intellectual humility. That's something I definitely would want my kid to have.
- [60:02]
Tenille Porter
I am not a parent, and I. My heart goes out to all of you parents out there, and it's a wonderful job and it's really, really important. And I have friends and I have siblings with kids, and they do worry about this, which is interesting, even about the humility thing specifically. So how can you encourage this in kids? As a parent, I will always go back to the kind of practice what you preach. So find ways to model it. Say you're asked a question and you're not sure. Like, don't derogate the question. Or be like, how could anyone ever know? Or on the 15th, why? Question? Just, like, lose your mind and give up. It's like, well, I'm not sure. Like, trying to model intellectual humility. I'm not sure. Maybe we can try to look it up together. So modeling is important. Celebrating intellectual humility. It's really hard for a kid to be vulnerable in certain settings and just be like, I was wrong. I got that wrong. I don't understand. I don't know. Showing that to another person can be tough. So when that happens, that's a good thing to celebrate. Like, wow, I'm so proud of how brave you are to admit that that's a really good sign of character. I'm really proud of you for doing that. So celebrating when your child has humility is really important.
- [61:31]
Chris Duffy
I don't know if you've studied this, but I wonder if there's also a gender gap in intellectual humility. Because I certainly think that a lot of the ideas of what it means to be a man in society have to do with this, like, decisiveness and certainty and not backing down. And I think that, you know, there's so many ways in which, like, these strict gender roles, like, trap men and don't allow them to grow or to be their full selves.
- [62:03]
Tenille Porter
That's super interesting. It's a great point. And what we see is that teenage boys are a lot more likely to endorse the idea that it's bad to show any kind of weakness. So we look at boys and girls on that kind of survey item. The boys are like, I don't want to show weakness. And admitting you don't know something, if it's a sign of weakness, they think it is a sign of weakness. It's not a good thing to do. So there definitely are gender dynamics working here. But what we also see, and perhaps this is linked to some research showing that girls and young women feel, feel this pressure to be sort of perfect, is that when it comes to say, like raising your hand to speak up in a class and say, I don't understand that or I don't know what that is, when you're kind of showing that to the whole class and interrupting the class to take the class's time to do that, that's something that girls are much more hesitant about doing than boys are. We see that in lots of studies. So we find in those studies that when the teacher has modeled that humility first, girls become a lot more comfortable voicing their own questions in that setting. And that gap between boys and girls and how comfortable they are voicing their question closes.
- [63:27]
Chris Duffy
Yeah, it also makes me think that if you're non binary or if you don't fit into the spectrum, I imagine that actually requires a little bit more intellectual humility because you just have to create some of your own path there. You have to be willing to imagine something that is outside of a yes or no. And I wonder if that would actually require more intellectual humility as well. But also then I can see the other side, right? Like, you also have to have this like, definitive sense of, like I, I know this to be true about myself. And even when everyone else is going to tell me something that's, that's not right, I have to hold true to that. So I could see both ways. I, I think all of these, right, there's, there's always these competing tensions.
- [64:03]
Tenille Porter
Maybe it's very intellectually humble of you to see it both ways. And this conversation is already taking effect. I like that. I think that you're right. And I think some of these conversations around gender are asking us to question categories that are really old and that have been pretty rigid and that, you know, that we can asking us to take another look at these categories. And I think there's real value in doing that.
- [64:33]
Chris Duffy
How would having more intellectual humility impact our society right on this larger level, how would it change the way that we live in our world if people across the board really embrace this and tried to cultivate this.
- [64:46]
Tenille Porter
I think if people really embrace this, we would see, we would literally see more progress. I think we would learn more because we would begin to stop holding so tightly to what we think is true so we might question and push the boundaries further, which would allow us to progress. You know, right now we're going through a kind of trauma in the country as folks are divided. It's hard to even have a conversation with somebody who disagrees with you politically or is on the other side of the aisle. And I think if we embrace intellectual humility, we find it's easier to get along and love each other.
- [65:30]
Chris Duffy
Tenille, thank you so much for being on the show. It's such a pleasure talking to you.
- [65:33]
Tenille Porter
Thank you so much. I'm really glad to have been here.
- [65:39]
Chris Duffy
That is it for this episode of how to be a better Human. Thank you so much for listening. If I got anything wrong, I apologize and I will try to be intellectually humble about doing better in the future. Thank you so much to today's guest, Dr. Tenille Porter. I am your host host Chris Duffy and you can find more from me, including my weekly newsletter and other projects@chrisduffycomedy.com how to be a Better Human is put together by a team of intellectual giants. On the TED side we've got Daniela Ballorezzo, Band Ban Chang, Chloe Shasha Brooks, Valentina Bohanini, Lainey Lott, Antonia Leigh, and Joseph De Bruyne. This episode was fact checked by Julia Dickerson and Matthias Salas who both epitomize the spirit of accepting and then correcting mistakes on the prx. They are humble royalty, Morgan Flannery, Norgill, Patrick Grant, and Jocelyn Gonzalez. Thanks again to you for listening. Please share this episode with a friend or a family member. Someone you know who epitomizes intellectual humility, or someone who desperately needs to learn more about intellectual humility. Either way, share it with them. Thank you for helping us to spread the word about this show. We will be back next week with even more how to be a better Human. Until then, take care.
- [67:18]
David McRaney
That is it for this episode of the you are not so Smart podcast. For links to everything we talked about, head to you are not so smart.com or check the show notes right there in your podcast player. My name is David McCraney. I have been your host. In those show notes you can find my book how minds Change wherever they put books on shelves and ship them in trucks. Details are@davidmcraney.com and I'll have all of that in the show notes as well. Right there in your podcast player on my homepage davidmcraney.com you can find a roundtable video with a group of persuasion experts featured in the book talking all about it. You can read a sample chapter, download a discussion guide, sign up for the newsletter, read reviews, all sorts of things. For all all the past episodes of this podcast, go to Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Audible, Spotify, or you are not so smart dot com. You can follow me on Twitter and threads and Instagram and Blue sky and everything else that's like that at David McCraney at symbol David McCraney Follow the showt Smart blog. We're also on Facebook. You are not so smart. And if you'd like to support this one person operation, no editors, no staff, just me, go to patreon.com you are not so smart pitching in it. Any amount gets you the show ad free. But the higher amounts that'll get you posters and T shirts and signed books and other stuff. The opening music that is Clash by Caravan Palace. And if you really, really, really want to support support this show. The best way to do that, just tell people about it. Either rate and comment on it on all these platforms or just tell somebody directly. Hey, you should check out this show. Point them to an episode that really meant something that really connected with you and check back in in about two weeks for a fresh new episode. I don't mean to interrupt your meal, but I love Geico's fast and friendly claim service.
- [69:32]
Tenille Porter
Well, that's how Geico gets 97% customer satisfaction.
- [69:36]
David McRaney
Yeah, I'll let you get back to your food.
- [69:39]
Tenille Porter
So are you just going to watch me eat?
- [69:41]
Chris Duffy
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