Using self-affirmation to increase intellectual humility in debate

Autor: Paul H. P. Hanel, Deborah Roy, Samuel Taylor, Michael Franjieh, Chris Heffer, Alessandra Tanesini, Gregory R. Maio
Jazyk: angličtina
Rok vydání: 2023
Předmět:
Zdroj: Royal Society Open Science, Vol 10, Iss 2 (2023)
Druh dokumentu: article
ISSN: 2054-5703
DOI: 10.1098/rsos.220958
Popis: Intellectual humility, which entails openness to other views and a willingness to listen and engage with them, is crucial for facilitating civil dialogue and progress in debate between opposing sides. In the present research, we tested whether intellectual humility can be reliably detected in discourse and experimentally increased by a prior self-affirmation task. Three hundred and three participants took part in 116 audio- and video-recorded group discussions. Blind to condition, linguists coded participants' discourse to create an intellectual humility score. As expected, the self-affirmation task increased the coded intellectual humility, as well as participants’ self-rated prosocial affect (e.g. empathy). Unexpectedly, the effect on prosocial affect did not mediate the link between experimental condition and intellectual humility in debate. Self-reported intellectual humility and other personality variables were uncorrelated with expert-coded intellectual humility. Implications of these findings for understanding the social psychological mechanisms underpinning intellectual humility are considered.
Databáze: Directory of Open Access Journals