What to do
The most important mark of intellectual dependability is that someone genuinely cares about your intellectual wellbeing. They want to help you get to the truth, gain knowledge, deepen your understanding, and develop your skills for enquiry. They possess the foundational virtue of intellectual benevolence.
As a virtue, intellectual benevolence involves patterns of emotion and thought, not just actions. The intellectually benevolent person cares when other people make intellectual gains, and takes pleasure in this. They also have mature views about the relative importance of such gains. They understand, for example, that it’s better for a person to develop skills that can help them acquire a wide array of knowledge about a subject than it is for them to be served up with a short list of facts.
The American geneticist Barbara McClintock was known for these qualities. Around 1930, she identified a pathway for establishing the chromosomal basis of genetics through her work with corn seeds. Rather than insisting on pursuing this research on her own, she gave the project to her brightest graduate student, Harriet Creighton, who subsequently gained worldwide recognition for the discovery, alongside McClintock.
There are many ways a person can fail to be intellectually benevolent. The most obvious, and most extreme, is by being intellectually malevolent. This kind of person is motivated to do intellectual harm to others. They enjoy it when people make mistakes or look stupid, and like to cause confusion.
A more subtle form of intellectual unreliability is social vigilantism. Social vigilantes are individuals who are highly motivated to influence others’ views. They want to win arguments and to lead people to see things their way. They think they’ve gotten things right, and they believe that those who get things things right have a responsibility to lead others to get things right, too.
At first, it might seem that there’s something attractive about the idea that those who are intellectually better-off should help those less intellectually well-off. And at least social vigilantes care how others think – which also seems good. But the problem is that they care in the wrong way. They don’t care that other people have correct views; they care that other people share their views. They don’t care for other people to make discoveries; they care that they themselves are the ones to lead others to their conclusions.
Research reveals that social vigilantism is correlated with a number of problematic traits and behaviours – for example, tending to gravitate toward more extreme views about divisive topics such as climate change. Social vigilantes vigorously advocate for their extreme positions, and champion others who do the same. In this way, they polarise beliefs in their communities, rather than promoting mutual understanding and discovery.
It’s not always easy to sort the intellectually benevolent person from the social vigilante. But one way to do it is to pay attention to what they get excited about. Are they gladdened by your intellectual progress in general, or only when they succeed in influencing your thinking?
A second sign of intellectual reliability is that the person tends to share their perspective with you faithfully, out of a motivation to help you progress. They recognise that sometimes – though not always – they’re in a position to strengthen your perspective by sharing their own. And they’re skilled in identifying their own perspective, and in helping you enter into it and appreciate it. They possess the virtue of intellectual transparency.
The English philosopher G E Moore was described by his students in a way that suggests he was especially transparent in his teaching. In one lecture, he would put forward a position he was inclined to embrace, only to begin the next lecture explaining why his previous view was wrong. In some cases, if he couldn’t see an obvious logical pathway forward, he would announce that he was going to ‘make a jump’ and see if this might lead to greater understanding.
There are several ways a person can fail to be intellectually transparent. One is by being intellectually vain. A vain person wants others to think well of them. They are concerned with their reputation. When they share their views, they do so with this worry in mind. Unlike the transparent person, the vain don’t share their perspective in order to promote your intellectual wellbeing. Instead, they share it selectively, to convey the best impression of themselves. Often, the vain inflate their intellectual standing, pretending to know things they don’t, or to have stronger evidence than they do, to win approval.
Another way to fail to be transparent is by being intellectually timid. In contrast with the vain, the timid tend to adopt negative attitudes toward their intellectual features. They hold a poor opinion of the state of their knowledge, and are fearful of being exposed for their ignorance. This leads them to shy away from the limelight, and to refrain from contributing to group knowledge even when they have something to say. They’d rather keep quiet to avoid the harm to their self-esteem that would come from revealing themselves to be uninformed. So they might refrain from telling you what they know, even when they could help you.
How can you tell the difference between the transparent person, and the vain or timid one? Focus on how they react to others’ opinions of their ideas. Fearfulness about how their ideas will be perceived, or over-eagerness for their ideas to please you or others, are signs that they might lack transparency.
A third mark of intellectual dependability is that the person tends to remove or resolve sources of ambiguity when they’re communicating with you. They recognise that they can help you only if you understand them, and that ambiguity gets in the way of understanding. Thus, this person removes or resolves any ambiguity so that you grasp what they mean. They have the virtue of communicative clarity.
There are many techniques for resolving ambiguity. Clear communicators stress their main points, and distinguish them from what is merely incidental. They define key words or phrases. They explain how their views contrast with others that might be confused with them. Their communications are structured to be easy to follow, where the function of each part is apparent to you.
One way to fail to be a clear communicator is to be susceptible to pseudo-profundity. Such people are especially open to and receptive toward potentially deep insights. This receptivity can lead them to misidentify gibberish as containing profound meaning. In tasks designed to assess individuals for their level of susceptibility to pseudo-profundity, participants were asked to rate the profundity of randomly generated combinations of abstract buzzwords such as ‘Hidden meaning transforms unparalleled abstract beauty’. People in general rated these statements as somewhat profound; those who rated their profundity higher were more susceptible to pseudo-profundity.
While valuing insight is a good thing, the proclivity to see through profundity-coloured glasses is a liability when it comes to being intellectually dependable. Those with a pseudo-profound streak also tend to be more susceptible to misidentifying fake news as real news. Moreover, these individuals might be motivated to make themselves sound profound, even when they have little of substance to say. They might dress up their empty ideas with seductive trappings and even gain substantial followings, all the while leading their followers into confusion.
Fortunately, you can sort out the virtuously clear communicator from those susceptible to pseudo-profundity. If someone has said something you couldn’t understand, ask them to put it in a way you can understand. If they shy away from this or insist that it’s you who has the problem, this indicates a lack of communicative virtue.
A fourth sign of intellectual reliability is that people with this quality appreciate the distinctive features of their audience. They pay attention to your particular views, experiences, abilities and tendencies. They fit their communications to your predicament to help you advance, and display the virtue of audience sensitivity.
By contrast, one form of audience-insensitivity is when people pay little attention to their listeners, obsessing more over their own features, a trait that psychologists call self-consciousness. Such people tend to agree strongly with claims such as ‘I’m always trying to figure myself out.’ As a result, self-conscious people don’t have time to figure out their audiences.
People can also be too selective in their attention. Judgmental people, for example, are highly alert to embarrassing, bad or problematic features of their listeners, while they’re less interested in their audiences’ strengths. Or they might be alert to features of their audience that reflect well on themselves: they’re motivated to see themselves as superior, and so look out for others’ comparative weaknesses. This gives them a distorted view of their listeners.
To determine whether someone you’re depending on is virtuously sensitive, you might ask yourself the following. Do they demonstrate that they understand your point of view, your intellectual needs, your abilities? Do they ask you about these features, trying to learn about you? Do they communicate with you in a way that’s personal to who you are? If the answer is no, they might not make a reliable intellectual guide.
Finally, the intellectually trustworthy person displays a certain open-ended wisdom in supporting you with your enquiries. They appreciate the many decisions involved in seeking knowledge. They understand that people make choices about when to gather more evidence, where to look for it, and how to weigh it, as well as which methods to use and whom to rely on. They’re skilled in helping you navigate the potential risks and benefits that present themselves in your pursuit of learning. They possess the virtue of intellectual guidance.
In contrast, some people have a psychological need for closure. Such people are highly motivated to complete enquiries, and are turned off by ambiguity. They want definite answers quickly, and they want to stick with them. Psychologists call the twin components of this need ‘seizing’ and ‘freezing’. Those with a strong need for closure seize quickly on any information that promises to resolve their questions – and once they’ve chosen an answer, they tend to ignore any contradictory information, freezing on the answer they’ve come to.
A strong need for closure isn’t always problematic. Decisiveness is, after all, a highly valued ability in leaders. Yet this need can be an impediment when it comes to nuanced topics necessitating methodical, careful reflection – precisely the sorts of topics about which you so often need others’ guidance. Such ambiguous matters demand the kind of thinking that those who need closure can’t put up with. Instead, they’re likely to offer you unwise advice that oversimplifies the issue.
A key feature to look for in an intellectual guide is patience. Does the person you’re depending on take the time to appreciate the complexities of your predicament, or are they too quick to jump in and try to ‘fix it’?
Whether a person is intellectually dependable or undependable will tend to reveal itself in their emotions, thoughts and actions. The better we attend to these signs, the better we can function within our networks, and the better we can figure out what to think about the complex problems we confront.
