The Benefits of Intellectual Humility in Teenagers

Tuesday - December 26 2023, 06:07 UTC - 11 months ago

My research has examined adolescents who are willing to acknowledge that their knowledge and perspective are not complete - a trait known as intellectual humility. My colleagues and I investigated whether being intellectually humble was beneficial or harmful. We found that teens who were intellectually humble were more likely to try and improve after setbacks than teens who were not intellectually humble, indicating that intellectual humility is a positive attribute for young people.

If you, like me, grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, you may have come across the classic refrigerator magnet, "Teenagers, leave home now while you still know everything." .

Perhaps you know a teen, or maybe you were a teen, like this: pop-star energy, a little too confident in your opinions, a little too certain that no one could know what you know. Adolescence is the period of life when people transform from children into adults. To handle the transition successfully, people need to shed parental dependencies and become more autonomous and independent. So it makes sense that teens think – or at least act like – they know everything.

I’m a scholar of how people, at any stage of life, handle the fact that they do not actually know everything.

My research has examined what happens to young people who, amid the emotional, social and hormonal storms of adolescence, find themselves relatively willing to acknowledge that their knowledge and perspective are actually limited. This is an attribute scholars like me call "intellectual humility," which describes a person’s recognition that there are gaps in what they know and that those gaps make their beliefs and opinions fallible.

My colleagues and I wondered whether anything was different about teens who recognize this fallibility – who are intellectually humble – and those who don’t. We really weren’t sure, because the answer is not obvious. On one hand, being aware of their own ignorance and fallibility might be an asset for teenagers by making them more teachable and open-minded, and perhaps even more likable. On the other hand, perhaps awareness of their ignorance could be so overwhelming that it makes them feel defeated and helpless, essentially shooting young people in the foot before they have even gotten off the starting line of their adult life.

We wondered whether, and to what extent, intellectual humility is beneficial for youth and to what extent it might actually be harmful.

Anticipating failure .

In a series of studies that collectively enrolled over 1,000 participants, high school students rated themselves on the degree to which they agreed with statements like "I acknowledge when someone knows more than me about a subject" and "I question my own opinions, positions and viewpoints because they could be wrong" as indicators of intellectual humility.

We then asked students to imagine that they had failed a quiz in a new class and, critically, what they would do next. Students rated a series of possible responses to this setback, including more mastery-oriented responses, such as "study harder next time," and more helpless responses, such as "avoid this subject in the future." .

The students who had rated higher in intellectual humility more strongly endorsed the mastery responses, showing that the intellectually humbler they were, the more they said they would try to learn the difficult material. The students’ degree of intellectual humility did not coincide with their helplessness ratings. In other words, the intellectually humbler students were not more defeated and helpless. Rather, they were more interested in improving.

Actually encountering failure .

We also conducted another study with moment-to-moment assessments from 185 real high school classes. The day after concluding our assessments, we asked teachers to send us data about how well their students did on a quiz they had given in class.