It’s clear that the world needs more intellectual humility. But how do we develop this virtue? And why do so many people still end up so arrogant? Do our own biases hold us back from becoming as intellectually humble as we could be—and are there some biases that actually make us more likely to be humble? Which cognitive dispositions and personality traits give people an edge at being more intellectually humble - and are they stable from birth, learned habits, or something in between? And what can contemporary research on the emotions tell us about encouraging intellectual humility in ourselves and others? Experts in psychology, philosophy and education are conducting exciting new research on these questions, and the results have important, real-world applications. Faced with difficult questions people often tend to dismiss and marginalize dissent. Political and moral disagreements can be incredibly polarizing, and sometimes even dangerous. And whether it’s Christian fundamentalism, Islamic extremism, or militant atheism, religious dialogue remains tinted by arrogance, dogma, and ignorance. The world needs more people who are sensitive to reasons both for and against their beliefs, and are willing to consider the possibility that their political, religious and moral beliefs might be mistaken. The world needs more intellectual humility. In this course, we will examine the following major questions about the science of intellectual humility: • How do we become intellectually humble? • What can human cognition tell us about intellectual humility? • How does arrogance develop, and how can we become more open-minded? • How do emotions affect our ability to be intellectually humble? All lectures are delivered by leading specialists, and the course is organised around a number of interesting readings and practical assignments which will help you address issues related to humility in your daily life. This course can be taken as a part of a series which explores the theory, the science and the applied issues surrounding intellectual humility. In the previous course on the theory behind intellectual humility, we considered how to define intellectual humility, the nature of an intellectual virtue, and how we know who is intellectually humble. If you are interested, complete all three courses to gain a broader understanding of this fascinating topic. Look for: • Intellectual Humility: Theory - https://www.coursera.org/learn/intellectual-humility-theory • Intellectual Humility: Practice - https://www.coursera.org/learn/intellectual-humility-practice
Illusions of the outsourced mind
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From the course by The University of Edinburgh
Intellectual Humility: Science
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From the lesson
What makes us arrogant? Biases, heuristics and cognitive psychology
Professor Frank Keil discusses a number of biases which we all have, and which can make us more arrogant and dogmatic by leading us to think that we know more than we actually do. Can you find examples of those biases in the news, and perhaps even in yourself?
Meet the Instructors
Dr. Ian ChurchResearcher
Epistemology; Philosophy of Psychology; Philosophy of Religion
Professor Duncan PritchardProfessor of Philosophy
University of Edinburgh
Dr. Emma GordonPostdoctoral Researcher
University of Edinburgh
[MUSIC]
Our final set of illusions of knowing occur with what we might call
the illusions of the outsourced mind. And this arises from a bias
that's known as the individualism bias, which leads one to think that
individual intellectual competence is much greater than it really is.
Perhaps this is motivationally important for young children to not realize how
incredibly dependent they are on other minds for getting around in the world.
But even in adults, there is the tendency to assume that
one knows a great deal more in one's own mind than one really does.
And one tends to overlook the facility and ease at getting information indirectly.
In other words, one often relies on experts or external sources for
understanding how the world works, but
one may often overlook that one's doing that and think it's all in one's head.
This occurs often in transactive memory, where you have couples, who might've been
married for 40 years, who fill in each other's knowledge gaps all the time, and
the other member or the partner doesn't realize that this is happening.
Perhaps when they go shopping, one person gets the vegetables,
another one gets the meats,
and they just assume they have that compass themself to evaluate those pieces
of merchandise when, in fact, they're relying heavily on the other person.
You also see it in underestimating external knowledge information sources.
And we'll see that in a second.
So I want to give you two examples of how we get illusions of the outsourced mind.
One has to do with understanding word meanings, and
the other has to do with Internet search.
The misplaced meaning line of work relies heavily on an idea developed long ago by
the philosopher Hilary Putnam called the idea of the division of linguistic labor.
And this is the idea that we often know the meanings of words
through hunches about who the relevant experts are.
You think you know the meaning of gold, but in fact, you may not be able to tell
the difference between fools gold and real gold, except by deferring to an expert.
So you know the meaning of gold, but
only through a chain of deference to another mind.
You don't really know it directly.
You dont' know the atomic properties to distinguish gold from impostors.
Now, in a study that we did to try to test this,
we gave people large lists of pairs of words.
And there were three kinds of pairs.
There were known similars, unknown similars, and pure synonyms.
The known similars were things like wolf-dog, rowboat-canoe, seal and walrus.
The unknown similars were things like ferret-weasel, pine-fir,
and blackbird-starling.
And the pure synonyms were things like sofa-couch, car-automobile, and
baby-infant.
We'd give them a long list of these words, all mixed together, and
have them quickly rate how many features they knew they could tell apart in them.
The idea here was to look at their gut impressions of how much
they understood the differences and the meanings of all these pairs.
And we did it quickly so they couldn't self test and actually assess them.
And what you find is the following. The left holds most panels, the number of
features they thought they could list for something like rowboat and canoe.
The next panel, the middle panel, is how many thought they could list for
things like ferret and weasel.
And the final panel is how many thought they could list for true synonyms,
like baby and infant.
What you see is they all thought they could list far few features for
the true synonyms, which is, of course, accurate.
We then asked them to actually list the number of features that they
knew between them.
The mistake they made was in thinking that they could list just as many features for
the unknown similars, like weasel and ferret, as the known similars.
When in fact, when we asked them to list the features, they were no better for
the unknown similars than they were for the true synonyms.
In other words, they know no features that distinguish weasel from ferret.
But because they knew about the presence of experts out there in the world
who did know the difference, and they knew that they probably knew several features,
they displaced that knowledge into their own minds.
There's a much more modern case of this that we've recently uncovered that has to
do with illusions of understanding,
that are induced by engaging in Internet search.
One of the things about Internet search is that when one
looks at stuff on a search engine, such as Google,
one has instant access to unbounded information, and that instant and
easy availability of comprehensive explanations and information may lead one
to think that one knows stuff that one can only get through search itself.
In other words, the boundary between what's in one's mind and
what's out there in the world can get blurred and one starts to think stuff that
one is searching for is stuff that one actually knows.
You can intuitively get some sense that this is true
when you think about what happens when you become unplugged from the Internet.
Sometimes, for reasons that you didn't want to, you were perhaps on a vacation
and the hotel you went to doesn't have Internet service or it fails, you can,
over several days, and
you don't have good cellphone service, have no access to the Internet at all.
And one might start to realize that one didn't understand things as well as one
did, and some knowledge one thought one had, one didn't really have.
Perhaps one thought one knew about the plots of certain movies one was going to
see, or one understood something about the weather systems where one were, or
the history of the location where one's traveling.
And all that knowledge starts to shrink down and one feels rather pathetic.
In my own life, I've experienced this a few times when I was isolated
by a hurricane or some other natural weather event, and I felt my knowledge
getting shrinking almost on a daily basis as I realized how much I was dependent or
parasitic off the Internet for insight.
So what we did is we did a series of studies to illustrate this point.
We would have one group of participants who had unlimited access to the Internet
to answer questions about how things work, like how does a zipper work.
Other groups would answer this question without access to the Internet.
Sometimes, just off the seat of their pants, sometimes by reading it from
a printed print-out that was the same as what they find on the Internet, but
not one which they actually searched for.
Then the groups were asked to rate their ability to answer questions on a seven
point scale.
And then the second phase, they all rated their own ability and
the extra ability to answer questions to six domains,
unrelated to the question posted in the first phase.
So, I ask you to how well you understand how a zipper works,
you look it up on the Internet or you don't, you do this for a bunch of items,
and now I ask you about items completely unrelated to those you've searched for,
say how a flushed toilet works, and how well you think you understand those.
What we find is that, regardless of how we construct the task in many, many different
conditions, the Internet group rates higher in many kinds of knowledge.
So whether it's knowledge about weather, knowledge about science,
knowledge about history, knowledge about food, knowledge about the human body,
or knowledge about health, people who've just engaged in Internet search for
items unrelated to the ones that are now being asked,
nonetheless inflate their understanding.
It's as if they think 'Hh my goodness, I really understand the world well' and
this inflates their knowledge for things that they haven't searched for, but
they still have this sense of access to the Internet that makes them think they
know things better in their own head.
One question you can ask is, do they really think it's in their own head, and
we've done a variety of follow up stages to show that they really do.
One particularly vivid example can be illustrated by physically instantiate what
it means to be in the head.
To do this, we engaged in what we might think was a little neuro-fiction.
We told people that when you understand something better,
your brain lights up more.
There's more brain activity.
So we showed them these fabrications.
These are not real neuro images, these are basically colored in red images.
And we said that when you don't understand something very well, the left-most panel,
you have just a little bit of red glowing.
When you understand it better, you have more activation of the brain,
all the way up to the far right, which would be level seven of understanding.
Again, I caution you that this is not real data, this is just neuro-fiction.
But the vast majority of our participants believed it and
thought this was a way of measuring how much you know.
We said, okay, now they've just engaged in Internet search, or they just
engaged in answering the question without Internet search, and we asked them
how well do you think you understand this as measured by your brain activation.
Slide this cursor on the screen along the bottom until you think it corresponds to
the level at which your brain would be activated when understanding this.
So, how much knowledge do you have in your own head is indicated by brain activation.
And what you find is they slide it further along, they give a higher rating of their
own brain activation levels, after just having engaged in Internet search.
So regardless of how we measure it, there's a strong effect.
People tend to see intellectual individual autonomy as far greater than it is.
They think they're often lone wolves, investigating the world on their own,
they figure out things on their own, and they grossly overlook their
reliance on external experts, through deference, external sources, and the like.
And this seems to be aggravated by having very easy access to instant information.
50 years ago, it might have been having an encyclopedia in the basement, but
today, it's having the Internet at your fingertips.
All right, let me conclude.
There are many sources of intellectual arrogance, intellectual humility.
Many different cognitive biases and factors that can contribute to them.
We focus mostly on heuristics and biases,
as opposed to the social motivational factors.
And we focused especially on those that consistently produce intellectual
arrogance, as opposed to intellectual humility because those seem to be much
more common.
In many cases, it is driven by knowledge structure, in content.
Knowing something tends one to make these misleading inferences and
attributions about what one else knows.
And sometimes, these can interact with other biases as well.
One of the challenges is that the plurality of causes of intellectual
arrogance may make limiting it much more difficult.
And so, one of the great research programs for
the future is to figure out ways that one can reduce intellectual arrogance
without simply making people feel terrible about what they know.
Thank you.
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