is professor of psychology at Pepperdine University in Malibu, US. Her research focuses on the psychology of religion, virtues (including intellectual humility), and other topics in the field of positive psychology. She has authored more than 50 peer-reviewed articles and two books.
is a philosophy professor at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He is the author of several books, including Character as Moral Fiction (2013) and Moral Psychology: An Introduction (2016), and dozens of research articles on topics ranging from intellectual humility to moral emotions to Friedrich Nietzsche to artificial intelligence.
is professor of psychology at Pepperdine University in Malibu, US. Her research focuses on the psychology of religion, virtues (including intellectual humility), and other topics in the field of positive psychology. She has authored more than 50 peer-reviewed articles and two books.
is a philosophy professor at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He is the author of several books, including Character as Moral Fiction (2013) and Moral Psychology: An Introduction (2016), and dozens of research articles on topics ranging from intellectual humility to moral emotions to Friedrich Nietzsche to artificial intelligence.
In 1860, Robert O’Hara Burke and William John Wills set out from Melbourne on an ill-fated group expedition to traverse Australia from south to north. On the final leg of their journey to the northern coastline, they were accompanied by two other colonial explorers from Melbourne and a group of Aboriginal guides. While they technically accomplished their goal, reaching the mangroves of the Gulf of Carpentaria in 1861, they died during the return journey, having made multiple catastrophic decisions involving both navigation and nutrition.
Return to Cooper’s Creek (c1860-61) by Samuel Thomas Gill. Courtesy the State Library of NSW
Burke and Wills were highly educated. Born in Ireland, Burke undertook military training in England and Belgium, and served as a lieutenant in the Austrian army. Wills received an education in surgery and chemistry in England, and later studied surveying in Australia. How did these men fail so badly at something their guides and their guides’ ancestors had managed to accomplish for tens of thousands of years? While documentation of this tragic story is incomplete, it seems relatively clear that Burke and Wills failed because they and their expedition group fell victim to collective intellectual hubris. They were overconfident in their own knowledge and therefore unreceptive to the wisdom that existed within their group, particularly that of their Aboriginal guides.
Indigenous Australians have inhabited the continent for approximately 65,000 years, including both the monsoon-prone coastal territories and the dry deserts that ultimately proved fatal to what was known as the Victorian Exploring Expedition. Burke and Wills might have been intellectually humble as individuals, and in their interactions with other colonisers, yet their expedition group did not manifest the collective intellectual humility to recognise and point out each other’s knowledge gaps, which would have made them more receptive to their guides’ untapped insights about how to survive in the harsh Australian climates. They are reported to have treated the Aboriginal people within their group with great suspicion, even rejecting offers of the nardoo plant that had been prepared in a traditional way that prevents vitamin B1 deficiency, choosing instead to eat it raw.
The failure of groups to be sufficiently intellectually humble at the collective level continues to contribute to disastrous outcomes, across diverse contexts, from the Boeing 737 Max crisis to the Theranos blood-testing fraud.
You may or may not be making life-and-death decisions but, whatever group you are a part of, in this Guide we will show you ways to help cultivate collective intellectual humility, meaning the tendency of a collective’s members to attend to each other’s intellectual limitations and to the limitations of the cognitive efforts of the collective. This will help your collective be more open and responsive to criticism, avoid quick fixes to complex problems, and give yourselves the space to creatively explore many options.
The value of collective intellectual humility
Philosophers and psychologists havestudied intellectual humility at the individual level for years. It’s usually conceived as owning your intellectual limitations. It is the ability to recognise these limits, and to respond appropriately to them both emotionally and behaviourally. Intellectual humility is challenging for many people – it can be uncomfortable to admit incompetence or failure – but it can be advantageous. An intellectually humble person sees what they lack and is motivated to address that lack by, for example, seeking out experts for guidance, gathering additional evidence, or pursuing further education.
Although intellectual humility is usually thought of as an individual trait, few of our intellectual endeavours occur in isolation from other people. Much of human reflection, interpretation, learning, deliberation and decision-making takes place in groups. Just as intellectual humility is advantageous for individuals, so it is for groups. Imagine what change is possible when collectives are open to discovering faulty thinking.
For example, by way of contrast with the Burke and Wills expedition, consider the story of what’s happened with the Indigenous tradition of ‘cool burns’. Indigenous Australians have, for thousands of years, employed this practice to safely burn off fuel in the underbrush of the bush. It reduces the amount of fuel that could eventually lead to catastrophic bushfires. It makes fires more manageable because they are intentionally lit at night or near dawn, when air temperatures are lower and dew slows the progress of the burns. It triggers seed germination in the local vegetation. And it protects the tree canopy. For decades, this practice was eschewed by colonial firefighting institutions, which tended to focus narrowly on extinguishing any blaze as soon as it occurred, rather than thinking in the longer term about reducing risk and encouraging biodiversity. Yet recently, especially after the devastating Australian bushfires of 2019-20, collective intellectual humility on the part of various firefighting institutions, both in Australia and elsewhere, has led to this Indigenous practice being recognised, appreciated and adopted.
Similarly, collective intellectual humility plausibly contributed to major international achievements that required diverse experts to recognise the limits of their own knowledge, such as the development of the COVID-19 vaccines. At a more modest scale, fostering collective intellectual humility can help families avoid conflict or companies achieve greater productivity and innovation.
You likely belong to a number of groups that could benefit from being intellectually humble as a group. From your place of employment to your book club, neighbourhood watch, parent group, religious community or volunteer organisation, you can have an important role to play in contributing to group dynamics that promote collective intellectual humility. And, no, you don’t have to be in charge of the group to make a meaningful difference. Leaders and ordinary members alike can agree to participate in an intellectually humbling environment.
It won’t all be plain sailing. Social dynamics frequently get in the way of collective intellectual humility. These include expectations of conformity, a lack of diverse thinking, or simply the social decorum that keeps us from shouting out each other’s weaknesses. These processes can land groups in the territory of pluralistic ignorance, group think or toxic polarisation. However, when done right, being able to count on each other to notice and respond to our intellectual limitations is a beautiful thing. Here are a few ideas for how to get started.
Key points
Many groups would benefit from cultivating the value of collective intellectual humility. Just as an intellectually humble person is more willing to make corrections and seek knowledge, a collective with intellectual humility is more open and responsive to criticism, avoids quick fixes to complex problems, and gives itself the space to creatively explore many options.
Help foster a group culture that encourages intellectual humility. Cultural changes canbegin with the individual members of a collective. You can play your part bystimulating broad participation from members of the collective, encouraging diverse perspectives within the group, and promoting postures of transparency, accountability, and openness to criticism.
Introduce anonymous balloting. Whether a collective needs to solve a problem or have space to reimagine, developing easy ways for people to voice opinions or provide ideas or feedback (for example, via online platforms or emails) is helpful. When people can contribute anonymously, this can increase the diversity of the perspectives shared.
Play devil’s advocate. For example,assign team members to explore contrary evidence, misrepresentations, and flaws of current positions or ways of doing things; initiate meetings to argue for alternative views or opposing options; or simply initiate informal conversations to this effect.
Conduct premortems. Rather than analysing failed plans after they fall apart, collectives can proactively imagine various ways in which they may not live up to their potential in the future, and then analyse reasons for the imagined failures.
Use a linguistic trick to create psychological distance from a problem. In group conversations, trytalking about your group as ‘they/them/their’ rather than ‘we/us/our’ as a way to gain a distanced perspective.
Embrace dissenting voices. Having a sprinkling of intellectually arrogant or dogmatic members in the collective, even when these individuals are wrong, can keep the discussion going so the collective can generate more ideas, explore more evidence, and form more arguments.
Help foster a group culture that encourages intellectual humility
Collectives, like their members, have intellectual limitations: a jury may be making a decision with incomplete information, a discussion forum may be relying on biased arguments, a corporation may use a flawed deliberation process, or a team of doctors might be engaging in faulty decision-making processes. Any collective like this would benefit from being aware of and addressing these limitations. This can be accomplished by adopting norms, expectations and incentives that promote intellectually humble interactions, for example by stimulating broad participation from members of the collective, encouraging diverse perspectives within the group, and promoting postures of transparency, accountability and openness to criticism.
We will offer some practical exercises that can help create such an environment; however, the first step is a matter of members wanting to participate in collective intellectual humility. Consider how the collectives you’re involved in might improve if the members were better at giving and receiving honest feedback. What if the groups you belong to experienced critical ideas not as negative criticism, but as a gift? Groups that are receptive to collective intellectual humility will be in a better position to welcome the norms and processes that build a culture of intellectual humility. This receptivity begins within individual members of a collective – by committing to this yourself, you will help play your part in this humble culture taking hold.
Introduce anonymous balloting
There are a number of existing activities from disciplines such as organisational psychology and political science that you can use in your circles to increase collective intellectual humility, beginning with anonymous balloting.
Collective intellectual humility thrives with more information and perspectives on the table. Whether a collective needs to solve a problem or have space to reimagine, developing easy ways for people to voice opinions or provide ideas or feedback is helpful. When people can contribute anonymously, this can increase the diversity of the perspectives shared, given that people will be less likely to self-censor. Maybe members of the book club want to discuss something more risqué; maybe certain workplace procedures aren’t seeming fair to employees; or maybe a think tank is stuck in a rut and needing fresh ways to operate. There are many ways to conduct anonymous polls or votes, including through free online platforms or anonymous emailing. Post a question and allow members to respond anonymously. This opens opportunities to hear and respond to the wisdom of the collective.
Play devil’s advocate
Historically, the role of the devil’s advocate in the Roman Catholic Church was to pose arguments against canonising a potential saint: searching for alternative explanations for miracles, verifying facts about the person’s life, and searching for character flaws. This was to ensure an unbiased evaluation of candidates. Modern-day collectives can use the same procedure by intentionally challenging current ideas or defending opposing positions. This can bring to light oversights or limitations in the positions, decision-making processes or plans of the collective. There’s a range of ways to do this: assign team members to explore contrary evidence, misrepresentations, and flaws of current positions or ways of doing things; initiate meetings to argue for alternative views or opposing options; or simply initiate informal conversations to this effect. Another option is to recruit individuals from outside the collective to play the role of devil’s advocate (a red team), which will offer valuable outside perspectives for consideration.
Conduct premortems
Rather than analysing failed plans after they fall apart, collectives can proactively imagine various ways in which they may not live up to their potential in the future, and then analyse reasons for the imagined failures. For example, one of our campuses (Pepperdine University) is built in a fire-prone area with limited road access. Rather than waiting to discover disastrous events through real life, university leadership engaged in a premortem exploration of all that could go wrong with a standard evacuation plan: the inability to quickly evacuate thousands of students without transportation, the likelihood of gridlocking local roads when evacuating the university community, the possibility that students would run into hazardous conditions while evacuating, and so forth. This process led to a plan that otherwise may have sounded counterintuitive. Rather than evacuating, the university community shelters in place. Having developed this plan in advance has allowed the community to prepare for this eventuality by maintaining fire-resistant shelter environments, stocking food and water, and developing protocols with local fire and law enforcement agencies.
Similarly, attorneys intuitively use premortems in the writing of legal contracts, thinking ahead to every possible way a contractual relationship might break down, building in cumbersome clauses for each.
So, before implementing a new decision, division, project line or other idea, your collective can come together to envision its failure, and consider the many problems that could lead to the demise: risks, design flaws, integration issues, competition, opportunity costs, technical challenges, client or consumer pushback, compliance issues and other unintended consequences. Such premortems are a great way for collectives to consider existing intellectual limitations and their consequences. Working backwards in this way allows for mitigation strategies and contingency plans to be implemented before the launch of something new.
Use a linguistic trick to create psychological distance from a problem
To date, research on cultivating intellectual humility has focused on individual people rather than collectives. For example, the psychologist Igor Grossmann has examined the method of self-distancing in which people focus on an interpersonal conflict they are experiencing, and write daily journal entries about it, in which they refer to themselves by their own name or using third-person pronouns. Compared with writing normally in the first person, this exercise helps people increase their intellectual humility by gaining psychological distance from their conflict.
It is worth considering whether something similar could be done by groups by making a practice of reflecting on their collective behaviour by talking about the group as ‘they/them/their’ rather than ‘we/us/our’. This might help the collective develop a better sense of intellectual humility in any challenging situations they face. For instance, members of a small business could make a habit of reflecting once a month on their successes and failures, referring to themselves in the third person rather than the first person. Or a firefighting brigade could conduct either postmortem or premortem assessments of their operations, referring to themselves in the third person rather than the first person. It’s not yet known how effective these interventions might be at the collective level, but the evidence from Grossmann and his colleagues working with individuals suggests that it’s worth you and your team or group giving it a go.
Embrace dissenting voices
You might assume that a collection of people who are, each of them, individually intellectually humble would make up a group characterised by intellectual humility. But it’s not always so simple. Just as individual intellectual humility involves recognising and responding in appropriate emotional and behavioural ways to the fact that I might be wrong, collective intellectual humility involves recognising and responding appropriately to the fact that we might be wrong. This recognition doesn’t come easily when all group members think alike, and groups therefore draw their conclusions too quickly.
Any team members who prolong the process of exploring, collecting facts and discussing can help groups be more creative and recognise areas in which they may have missed important information or been mistaken in their understanding. Surprisingly, having a sprinkling of intellectually arrogant or dogmatic members in the collective, even when these individuals are wrong, can keep the discussion going so the collective can generate more ideas, explore more evidence, and form more arguments. Especially when a collective is facing a complicated problem, having some stubborn dissenters can benefit the collective in the long run.
So, let’s be grateful for – or at least open to accepting – those people who (perhaps annoyingly) stick to their perspective and voice their disagreement. This is something to consider when it comes to adding new members to your collective or when you’re tempted to have someone booted out. Even when the views of stubborn dissenters aren’t right, they can facilitate a process that moves the collective in a better direction. Interestingly, these nonconformists often pay a personal price for their dissent – their social standing or reputation might suffer, and their views might be dismissed – yet their contributions are crucial for the team’s overall success. This means caution is required. The role of the nonconformist should be adopted primarily by people who can afford the intellectual and reputational stakes, who are dispositionally suited to accepting the associated risks, and who are likely to remain part of the community despite their disagreement with the consensus.
Final notes
As the social world becomes ever more connected, it will be increasingly important that we adopt intellectual humility not only as individuals but also in small and large collectives. Of course, not every group endeavour has the life-or-death stakes of the Burke and Wills expedition, but groups that lack intellectual humility can hurt both themselves and others. Collectives can be like runaway trains headed to the wrong conclusion, or they can experience a stalemate that grinds them to a halt. Decision-making regarding important societal topics such as pasteurisation, vaccination and the climate crisis require not only research evidence, but also collectives that are prepared to engage with one another and the world in intellectually humble ways.
That’s not to say that collectives should remain stuck while perpetually reconsidering alternative ideas and dissent. When genuine experts have reached a well-reasoned consensus on important issues, denialism by non-expert dissenters (consider, for example, Robert F Kennedy Jr, who was recently sworn in as the chief of the US Department of Health and Human Services) gives an opportunity for the collective to confirm their consensus and move forward, all the while remaining open to new evidence. Our schools, universities and public-facing institutions can take efforts to encourage a culture of collective intellectual humility, then speak and act decisively when, and only when, experts agree. (One of us recently joined an effort to show that it is possible to establish whether a global consensus of experts exists on a scientific proposition – in this case, the viral cause of COVID-19). You too can choose to participate in this process of collective intellectual humility in the groups to which you belong, whether the stakes are mundane or existential.
