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
Towards engagement: seeing the other as a person
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From the course by The University of Edinburgh
Intellectual Humility: Science
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From the lesson
Humility, emotions and human relations: a view from social psychology
Professor Vasu Reddy suggests that in understanding humility, we should focus on emotions rather than on reason; on what humility feels like, not how we understand it. Humility, she says, is not a special, lofty virtue - it's a commonplace, everyday thing, and it's about being open to engagement with others. Could this help you bring more humility to your daily interactions?
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
Okay. In the last episode,
we talked about trying to shift
the focus of how we understand humility slightly differently.
Just to summarize, we asked for three shifts of focus that we
needed in order to get a better understanding of humility as a moving,
changing, dynamic everyday thing.
And these three shifts focus were one, towards the emotional,
towards understanding it first and foremost as an affective or emotional phenomenon.
Second, towards the relational,
towards understanding humility as a relational event between
persons or subjects away from the inside and away from the self.
And third, towards the ordinary.
Humility as present in everyday transient and fleeting situations.
Thinking about this brings us
close to what I want to talk about in this episode which is engagement.
Understanding engagement is not easy.
It's a vague term and we can define it in 10 different ways.
We can pull definitions out of 10 different hats.
It's not really going to help us pin it down.
What we really need to understand engagement is its variety.
How do we think about it?
How do we see it? How do we experience it and why does it matter?
When does it matter in our everyday lives?
Discussions have emerged in two particular domains which have been
known not to be revealing of humility in its practitioners.
And one is in medical practice or in dialogues between doctors and patients, right.
And the other is between official representatives of
government or social workers or care workers in some kind of official capacity,
and their relations with people from other cultures.
In both of these areas,
problems of challenges to humility have frequently come up.
It's not surprising that in these two domains
discussions have emerged about how humility really is important,
and people take different lines, argue different things.
One of the things that people argue about is,
there's a new concept which has come up and goes some way towards understanding
engagement which is an idea called, narrative humility.
Narrative humility basically argues
that when you are in an encounter with a person from another culture,
(it's always other cultures, it's never us)
when you are in such an encounter,
what you are doing is not keeping your own judgment but
actually putting yourself out there in that conversation,
not just listening to the other person create their story,
but kind of co-creating their story with them
without dominating them and without letting them out,
so that they just are asked to do it,
to write their story, tell their story on their own.
Some kind of a participation in that dialogue.
And this sounds to me,
engage with them and then you get a good story.
That's what it sounds like.
Both of these things and both of these domains,
medical practice and in talking to other cultures,
involve something in us about the way we see in that moment,
the way we see the other as a person,
and both involve a participatoryness,
an openness to engagement and a kind of core authorship of what follows.
There's something about engagement we need to understand.
What is it? How do we think about it?
Well, thinking about this,
we've tried to come up with some criteria for engagement.
I'll list them for what they were.
They definitely overlap with each other.
They definitely, perhaps tap into something more core and more central.
But seeing them as slightly separate facets might
help us understand what we mean by
engagement and why it matters in understanding humility.
The first and probably the most important is seeing the other as a person.
Second, being involved, getting in there,
putting yourself on the line.
Third, not focusing on the self.
Fourth, leaving a door to dialogue open so you can hear the other.
That was four, now five,
appreciating value in the other,
and six being attracted to difference.
All of these features require some kind of an openness to connection,
and it is really not necessarily conscious.
Let's take that first criterion: seeing the other as a person.
It could be seen as being linked to many many discussions and the philosophical,
and indeed political science literature about recognition as a consciousness.
People have talked about it for years and years.
Hegel talked about it,
as you only- I think he says,
you only are a self-consciousness
because you have been recognized as a self-consciousness.
I've got the words wrong but it's something to that effect.
William James talked about being noticed,
as being absolutely crucial and not being noticed as being, he called it,
the worst form of torture because you simply cease to exist for somebody else.
And Charles Taylor talked about it as a vital human need and he
talked about it in the context of understanding race and colonialism,
and whole groups of people having an inability to be and to relate to
themselves successfully because they are not recognized by others.
So seeing the other as a person seems to be
involved in making the other exist as a person.
The aspect I want to focus upon really in relation
to this is in relating to another person.
Martin Buber distinguished something that he called
an I-Thou form of relating from an I-It form of relating.
For him, an I-Thou form of relating
involves me being utterly present in this moment of relating to you.
I see you as a Thou, right.
I see you as a person I'm talking to and I am not thinking of you as, "Oh,
that's the audience hidden behind the camera or that's
the camera person signaling to me not to make too many gestures."
I'm seeing you without the filter of all these things.
Without categorizing you as something,
making you a subject rather than an object.
I don't see you through another agenda.
I've got to entertain the audience.
I just am there with you in the moment and I see us a Thou.
I don't exclude your subjectivity and I adopt to what
has come to be called a second person stance towards you.
If I see you as a Thou,
as a you basically,
rather than he or she is sitting there behind the camera,
I'm talking to you in the second person not in the third person.
Not referring to you as a person out there,
but actually directly addressing you.
And this in so many different ways,
I'm biased towards understanding human development in babies,
but it's so many different ways that makes a phenomenal difference,
being addressed as a you.
It draws things out of you.
It allows things to happen and so on.
Think about examples where not seeing the other as a person can be,
is very common but also can be quite damaging.
Student passes you on the stairs,
you're so busy thinking of the meeting that you've got to get to,
all you see on the stairs is student after a student passing,
you don't see the person.
After you pass, you suddenly realize, "Damn,
they were looking at me and saying hello and expecting me to respond to them."
You haven't seen it. And it's okay,
it's a momentary damage,
it doesn't- probably they're not going to go home and cry about it,
but it could be damaging.
You have elections coming up and you open the door to a knock and you
see a member of another political party. What do you see?
You really don't see the person standing there,
you see the blue of the label,
you see a person representing a category of persons.
You do not see the person.
Now, you're not going to open your heart out to this person.
You're going to talk to them very much through
this filter of this label and this category.
Happens very often in medical communications.
There are examples galore where people talk about doctors rushing and saying,
"I don't have time to explain now.
Let me just get on with this."
Now obviously in cases of emergency,
you really want that to happen.
But in other cases, people are pushed aside and feel small. They feel demeaned.
They feel belittled by
that kind of de-prioritization because they don't exist as a person,
they exist as a patient.
There's another example which I'm intrigued by and I've talked about it at other times.
It's Anna Karenina, Tolstoy's Anna Karenina,
and so there's this man,
this kind of rather boring disciplined man
called Karenina who's married to this beautiful much younger vivacious Anna.
And his wife is young, she's popular,
she's lovely, she's a good dutiful wife.
But one evening at a party,
she spends rather long time talking to this handsome young soldier,
and he feels a bit uncomfortable.
He goes off home, this Mr. Karenina,
and prepares himself for
telling her when she comes home not to spend so much time talking to handsome young men.
Now, as he's- because he doesn't really doubt her,
he trusts her etc.
But as he's preparing himself,
he has a momentary glimpse of,
perhaps he's wrong, perhaps there is something in her
that he hadn't actually recognized before,
and I'll just read you the words.
"For the first time he vividly conjured up her personal life,
her thoughts, her wishes;
and the idea that she might,
even must have a personal life all her
own was so frightening that he hastened to drive it away.
This was the chasm into which he dared not look."
He was a bit of an extreme dried up person,
but he wasn't unusually arrogant,
he wanted to connect with her.
She comes home and here's where this fleeting,
swapping of roles happens.
She comes home full of being
enlivened by this encounter with
this young man who later on she has an affair with and so on,
but that's not yet on the cards.
That's not yet happened.
She comes home, he gently broaches this topic with
her and she puts up a wall. Says, "What's the problem?
There isn't anything wrong etc."
And he, despite his closing off of her consciousness to his consciousness,
despite that, in that moment of her putting up
this denial of his concerns immediately recognize there's something going on.
She, normally a very humble easygoing non-arrogant person,
in that moment of casting him off as, "Oh,
he's just cold and unfeeling," is absolutely being arrogant.
She's categorizing him into this category of a painful husband.
And we're probably familiar in our own lives with
many examples when we've had argument after argument within relationships.
A sibling, a parent, a husband,
a partner and so on and so forth where out of sheer exhaustion, we shut the doors.
We stop seeing them as persons.
And it's like that's the only thing we can do because we're only human and we have
limited sources of energy to deal with the emotions we have.
The point about here is, yes it is about seeing the other as a person but it is very,
very much rooted in how you feel at the moment and long-term.
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