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
Open-minded cognition: relations with other constructs
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From the course by The University of Edinburgh
Intellectual Humility: Science
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From the lesson
Dogmatism and open-mindedness in politics, religion, and life
Professor Victor Ottati (like Dr. Legare before) thinks that humility has a lot to do with being open to new ideas and to things we disagree with. He shows how our ability to be open-minded is related to our personal traits and to specific situations. How open-minded do you think you are about politics, religion, and any other ideas you disagree with?
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
As I said before when assessing
open-minded cognition we have three measures of it: general,
political and religious open-minded cognition and when assessing
relations with other constructs we will look at all three of these measures.
Before I look at relations however,
I wanted you to see mean levels of
open-minded cognition for each of these three measures.
As you can see on the left which shows the mean levels of general open-minded cognition,
in the middle, political open-minded cognition and on
the right religious open-minded cognition.
We have evidence of what we call slippage.
That is participant's individuals tend to
endorse open-minded cognition in the general or in abstract terms.
But when it comes to more specific domains such as politics and especially religion,
average levels of open-minded cognition are
somewhat lower or somewhat more closed-minded.
Now I'd like also to look at the inter-correlation between general,
political and religious open-minded cognition.
By the way when I present correlations in my presentations,
if a correlation has no star next to it,
it means it's non-significant which basically means it's essentially zero.
If a correlation does have a star next to it it means it's significant and meaningful.
So you can see that the three forms of
open-minded cognition are all positively correlated as we would expect.
If you look at the first column in this particular data display,
you'll see that political open-minded cognition was more strongly correlated with
general open-minded cognition than is religious open-minded cognition.
You'll also see in the second column that 0.492 correlation indicates
that people high in political open-minded cognition tend
to be higher in religious open-minded cognition.
But that correlation is not too high.
What that means is since it's not a perfect correlation,
some people can be high in political open-minded cognition,
but low in religious open-minded cognition or vice versa.
In other words, they're not measuring
exactly the same thing which is why it's important to
have separate measures of these constructs.
Interestingly, open-minded cognition is uncorrelated,
unrelated to most demographic measures.
OK. So in contrast to popular stereotypes.
For example if you look at age,
old people are not more dogmatic than young people.
Gender also, we do not see a tendency for example,
for females to be more open-minded than males.
Virtually zero effect here although in some of
our other data we do occasionally get a small effect in the direction I just mentioned.
Education, notice, is not really correlated with open-minded cognition.
Being educated does not necessarily make
a person more open-minded at least in our sample.
I should mention that our samples are a United States of America samples.
They are not necessarily fully representative of the entire country but
they are reasonably variable in terms of age,
religion, political affiliation and so on.
The only demographic correlation we see here is with place of residence.
Urban and rural residents differ.
People who live in cities tend to be slightly more open-minded than
people live in the country at least within our U.S. sample.
Now, I will then look at open-minded cognition.
How does it correlate with these other measures of similar constructs?
You want to show that these correlations aren't too high because if they're
extremely high it suggests you're
really measuring the same thing that's already been measured.
Well, you can see that it is correlated with similar constructs as we would expect.
It's positively correlated with need for closure,
positively correlated with a measure called actively open-minded thinking.
It's negatively correlated with dogmatism and intolerance of
ambiguity which you would all expect in terms of the directions of these correlations.
But none of these correlations are too high,
suggesting that we are in fact measuring something a
little different than these other similar measures.
As predicted, open-minded cognition was completely uncorrelated with need for cognition.
We were in fact delighted to see that this correlation was essentially zero because need
for cognition essentially measures amount of thinking and as I've said before,
open-minded cognition does not really tap amount of thinking,
it taps the directional bias in thinking.
This slide shows correlations between open-minded cognition
and the big five personality measures for
those of you who are familiar with personality theory.
And you do see some correlations here,
we see that open-minded cognition is positively associated with conscientiousness,
emotional stability-- the more stable a person
is the more open-minded they are and vice versa.
Openness to experience is positively correlated
with and agreeableness it's positively correlated with.
We then looked at the correlation between
open-minded cognition and various political measures.
As you can see open-minded cognition is associated with support for
democratic values and consistent with some work by Jost, Kruglanski, and others,
at least within the United States,
open-minded cognition is negatively associated with
conservatism and Republican party identification.
Interestingly, you see there that
political expertise is unrelated to open-minded cognition.
So being a political expert does not make you immune from dogmatism,
they're uncorrelated with each other.
Another interesting thing is the zero correlation
between political tolerance and open-minded cognition.
People who are high on political tolerance are
very strong advocates of freedom of speech.
For example, even though they may hate the KKK
within the U.S. which is an extremely racist organization,
they may argue that they should be provided with the right to
speak freely in public for reasons of freedom of speech.
What this zero correlation means is that you can strongly value freedom of speech,
but that doesn't necessarily mean that you are going to openly listen
to the KKK and openly consider their remarks when they do speak.
So these are two separate constructs.
Open-minded cognition and endorsement
of freedom of speech and other political tolerance sorts of items.
Here's some other interesting political correlations,
but you see here,
when we focus on the extent to which people pay close attention to politics,
let's say in the media,
their interest in politics,
the extent to which they engage in a lot of discussion with politics.
We see correlations with open-minded cognition but it's predominantly just with
our measure of political open-minded cognition in the middle column of this data set.
But the directions of those correlations make sense.
The more you pay attention,
the more interested you are in politics,
the more you discuss politics.
You tend also to be somewhat more open-minded.
Interestingly, when we look at the relationship between open-minded cognition
and various religious measures we pretty much obtained nothing.
These are as I said since these have no stars against them essentially zero correlations.
This is interesting in fact.
This may be related to our particular sample and we might be
able to find correlations in other samples but at least in our particular sample,
we had for example, anticipated that we would get
a negative correlation between open-minded cognition and religious fundamentalism.
We had anticipated that we would get
a positive correlation between open-minded cognition and quest
as well as spiritual openness because both of these tie into a tendency to be kind of
open to new spiritual approaches and belief systems and so on.
But we get nothing.
It is not associated with fundamentalism,
quest or spiritual openness and
even just general religiosity is not correlated. What does this mean?
This means that religious people when you compare them to
non-religious people are no more or less open-minded.
So there really is no huge,
there are no huge differences here.
Open-minded cognition does predict some interesting outcomes.
Specifically, empathic concern for others and
more favorable attitudes towards minority outgroup members.
So open-minded cognition is a measure of cognitive style but it predicts
empathic concern which is an the emotional component of empathy, which makes sense.
The more open-minded you are—willing to consider
another person's viewpoints even if they differ from your own—
the more likely you are to empathize with them.
And the causality could probably go either way on that.
We also see that open-minded cognition is associated
with more favorable attitudes towards minority group members.
These correlations emerge even when controlling for some of
those other measures that are similar to open-minded cognition.
So in summary, open-minded cognition is largely unrelated to most demographic variables.
It's simply a little bit higher for people who live
in the city than people who live in the country.
When we looked at how open-minded cognition correlates
with measures of similar constructs,
we found that they were related and correlated as
expected but that the correlations were not too high.
And so therefore our measure of open-minded cognition while
correlated with these other constructs such as dogmatism,
need for closure, intolerance for ambiguity,
is measuring something a little different.
Open-minded cognition was unrelated to need for
cognition as we predicted because it's not really assessing amount of thinking.
It is positively related to conscientiousness, emotional stability,
agreeableness and openness to
experience for those of you interested in personality measures.
Open-minded cognition is positively related to empathic concern
for others which is the emotional component of empathy
even when controlling for other variables and also is positively
related to more favorable attitudes towards outgroup members,
even when controlling for similar constructs.
Within the domain of politics,
open-minded cognition has to be positively related to democratic values,
news consumption, political discussion,
but negatively related to conservatism and Republicanism,
at least in the United States that is.
And then when we look at the relation between
open-minded cognition and various religious variables, not a lot there.
Not very many strong correlations.
For example, religious people compared to non-religious people are
no more or less open-minded than each other.
So in conclusion, we can regard general,
political, and religious open-minded cognition as distinct yet correlated constructs.
And open-minded cognition is related to a variety
of variables in a theoretically meaningful manner.
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