What to do when your beliefs are challenged (w/ Tenelle Porter)

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1:35you're listening to how to be a better human i am your host chris duffy one thing about me is that no one has ever accused me of having a small head i have a big head both literally in that i have trouble finding hats that fit and figuratively in that i think that i should stand on stage and have audiences of strangers listen to me talk and i host a podcast called how to be a better human Humility, not really my strong suit. Today's guest, Tenille Porter, is a professor and a researcher who studies humility. She's an important person for me to talk to. But Tenille studies a very specific kind of humility, intellectual humility.

2:11And that's actually a term that I had never heard of before meeting her. And now it's one that I cannot stop thinking about. Intellectual humility seems to me like it is the key piece that is missing from so many conversations in the world today. It really feels like this is something that more people need to know about. And here's how Tenille defines intellectual humility. Intellectual humility means understanding what you don't know and recognizing that you might be wrong. Of course, all of us think that we're right, and sometimes we are right. But that feeling of being right is a subjective experience, and it doesn't always match reality.

2:55So intellectual humility is really about understanding that our knowledge is partial, that nobody knows everything there is to know, and therefore we sometimes get things wrong. If there's one thing that I'm a pro at, it is getting things wrong. Now, I think we did get something right when we booked Tenille on the show today, and I'm so excited that we're going to get to talk to her about why knowing that you get things wrong is one of the most important things that you can get right. Hi, I'm Dr. Tenille Porter, and I am an assistant professor of psychology at Rowan University. So, Tenille, let's start with the fact that you study intellectual humility.

3:35That is something that I think many people are probably not familiar with, but I wonder if you have like a specific example that can illustrate this for people. Yeah, I can think of one recently. So, I was taking an international flight. So I was flying to England on a red eye. I got settled into my seat. I was in a window seat and we were just about done with boarding. The last few people were coming on and a woman came on the plane and kind of stood outside my row and said, you're in my seat. And I said, no, I'm not. I'm in 34A. And then the woman in the middle seat said, well, I'm in 33B. And then it was just very clear that, oh, I'm in the wrong seat.

4:26I was totally wrong. I'm so sorry. Let me get up. And everybody has to get up. And you may not have had

4:37seat on a plane. But every single person has had that experience of being totally wrong about something because we're humans and that's part of what it is to be human. It also seems to me like this is a field of study that I would have imagined was kind of intellectually interesting in the past and now feels like directly relevant to our everyday lives and survival of our species and societies. So holding space for the possibility that we might be wrong is not a new idea. It's been with us for a really long time. Scientists have written about it for thousands of years. Philosophers have written about it as something that we ought to be doing to have a good life.

5:25I think what's new now is that we're starting to study it scientifically. but it of course has bearing in so many different contexts and domains. How do you study this scientifically? We try to measure intellectual humility or we try to do experiments that will kind of change how intellectually humble people are or feel comfortable being in a certain context. So people take a questionnaire. Right now, I'm working on a different kind of measure where we're actually going to take high school students and ask them what they think about cell phone bans. So should they be allowed to have their cell phones in classes?

6:09Lots of high school students have really strong opinions on this issue, as you might imagine. And instead of asking them to say, like, how humble do you think you are about this issue? We're going to ask them to actually engage with perspectives that don't agree with them, with theirs. So how many reasons from a student who disagrees with you on this would you want to read? And we'll look at their behavior on this computer task and use that to measure how intellectually humble they are. Are there ages or phases where we are more intellectually humble? Or is it kind of one of those things where we have this moment at the beginning of our lives and then afterwards we just have to really work hard to become humble again?

6:50It's interesting. We're trying to learn about that still. So there's stuff that we don't know about that yet. But sometimes, you know, if you ask like a four-year-old, how much do you know about trucks or how much do you know about this really? Like why frogs look the way they do? A four-year-old is going to say, I know everything about that. I know everything. But as kids and just like you're saying, and I know you're a teacher, as kids get into school, they start to get better at calibrating how much they know and how much they don't know. And they become more accurate. And that accuracy is sort of like a nice trajectory that keeps getting higher and higher as they go through school.

7:31So they're getting better at it. And there's this idea, too, that with teenagers that like, oh, this must be a period when the humility like hits the floor. Like, I don't even know if they're capable of being humble. That's not really what we see, actually. if you look at all the data, teenagers aren't any more narcissistic than anybody else. So they're actually a little bit better than super young kids at knowing what they know and what they don't know. And then thinking about the whole lifespan. Yeah. Something that I've seen in my data is that sometimes as people get older, they're more intellectually humble.

8:12It's almost like with experience, you really come to just appreciate this fact of being a human being, which is that, you know, to be human is to err. We're all fallible. What is the opposite of intellectual humility? Is there a term for that? The opposite of intellectual humility is intellectual rigidity. It's like extreme certainty. But I think that what you're saying here also makes me think that it sort of makes me think about the interaction between confidence and humility. It's like this idea that can you be confident and intellectually humble at the same time? And I think that the answer is yes.

8:55And I I think that for a lot of people, you even have to have a certain amount of confidence to be able to show intellectual humility. It's like I'm so confident that I'm willing to be vulnerable in this way that I am wrong or I don't understand that or something. I don't know what that is. Tell me more about that. Yeah, it makes me think, too, you know, speaking to you right now, to Neil, you are a professor who is able to explain your work in a way that I think anyone would really be able to understand. And I think that I've talked to a lot of scientists and professors. Weirdly, I've had a career where I've interviewed a lot of scientists and professors.

9:34And I always think that that's really like a mark of confidence, right, of confidence in your work and in your mastery of the field, because it's really easy in academia to hide behind jargon, hide behind, you know, complex ways of saying simple things and making it so like, well, you couldn't possibly understand because I've done all this research and I've done so many years of schooling. to say something that, you know, someone else could understand if you said it more simply. But sometimes people hide behind that. And I think that is like a lack of confidence in themselves and in their research.

10:03Yeah, well, that's a great compliment. That's the best compliment that I've received. I also think even putting the confidence or competence aside, it's so much more pleasant to be with someone who can just say, I actually don't know, rather than saying, like, you know, giving a five minute monologue to obscure the fact that they don't know is never a fun conversation. Agreed. And I think something we're seeing with intellectual humility is that it's one of these things that does really help relationships. I was listening to something the other day, and it was about this test that you can ask on a first date.

10:36It's a test via a question. You can ask someone, do you believe in ghosts? And the whole program I was listening to is about how the answer to this question will tell you a lot about the person. So if they answer like, no, absolutely not. I do not believe in ghosts. And there's no information that you could ever provide to me to show me that ghosts are real. They're like really rigid. You're learning something that like, this is going to be like a kind of black and white thinking person. But if they're like, I don't actually believe in ghosts right now. But if like potentially, maybe you could show me something to convince me that ghosts are real, I would change my belief.

11:17Like this is a marker of intellectual humility. When you think about intellectual humility in that way, which is that you can be really rigid on one side or really rigid on the other, but then somewhere in the middle is this more flexible, intellectually humble state. For me, at least, a very natural comparison that that brings up is political beliefs or this spectrum of like what must be true. And it feels to me like we are in a cultural moment where there's very little cultural capital in having flexibility. And there's quite a lot of rewards and cultural pressure to be rigid in your beliefs.

12:00Yeah, I think that I do feel that. I think that I especially feel that in online settings, social media interactions, or I think that when it comes to interacting face to face, that we're not as sort of dogmatic and rigid as we appear online. And what this makes me think is to what extent we need big cultural shifts or big contexts that can support intellectual humility for it to really thrive. I think that changing some of those environments would be really impactful. So like what could a regular person do to create more environments for intellectual humility to thrive, both in themselves and also in the interactions they have?

12:50This is what I try to do. I try to model intellectual humility as a teacher. It really sets its own for students and it really licenses them to be able to express that uncertainty or just take a risk to admit, I don't know what that means. When I have said, you know, I know a lot about this topic, but I don't know everything there is to know, or you actually know this thing that I don't know. So you can help me understand that. I think that especially when we're in those positions, I don't know, of power or influence like a teacher in a classroom, that can be really powerful in setting the tone for that whole context.

13:29We're going to take a quick break and then we will be right back.

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15:52And we are back. Going back to teenagers, because you brought up teenagers before. I know you did a really important study on intellectual humility with teens. I feel like that same thing is a real skill that many people are learning in teenage years, which is that there are different paths, things that aren't necessarily like all black and white, and that you're figuring out what your story is versus what other people's story are, and whether you want to be part of the group or want to be part of the group. to be separate from the group. That's like a big piece of at least my experience with teenage years.

16:24And it felt like people around me. Can you talk to us both what you did with the study on teenagers and then also why you picked that particular age? I'll start with the second one. I pick that particular age because I care about teenagers. I worked with teenagers when I was in college as a youth mentor and it's just the stage of life that I think is really challenging and really rich. So much is happening that it fascinated me. I also think it was just a really important time in my own life. Like some of the most formative, just like core values and beliefs that I have, I think were forged in adolescence and young adulthood.

17:09So there's this idea out there that maybe at this time of life when you need to be separating from your parents and like making it like kind of breaking out on your own and you have this really strong urge to break out on your own then maybe what you need is like a really extreme like confidence and kind of like a stridency to help you make that difficult transition like this is the way it is like this is gonna help me break out. That's one story that we tell ourselves about teenagerhood. Another story that's possible is like, well, maybe it helps teenagers to be a little bit more flexible and open and intellectually humble about what they believe.

17:53Either one of those could be true. So I was curious, would, you know, what, what would intellectual humility in a teenager actually do to them? Like, would it make their lives worse? Or would it make their lives better or somewhere in between? and we looked at it in school. Graduating from high school is one of these really important milestones and that looks like from the data to set you up to like be on a path to have a longer life and a healthier life. So succeeding in school is pretty important for kids at this age. So we wanted to know would intellectual humility relate at all to how successful they were in school and And we found intellectually humbler teenagers were doing better in school.

18:38They were learning more. And they were more kind of persistent. So if they got negative feedback or a bad test grade, they were like, okay, I'm not giving up. Like, I'm going to redouble. Figure out, like, change code, whatever. Figure out what's going on and try harder next time. They were more receptive to feedback. So say they get some negative feedback on an essay or something. They're like, oh, that could be a good point. And they're more likely to kind of incorporate that feedback in a revision going forward. And all this culminates in earning higher grades, which is a marker of learning.

19:15So in a word, the intellectually humbler teenagers were learning more, seemed to help them in school. So that's like one study. I'm not sure if there's others. No, that's great. That's really helpful. And are there any findings that you found about intellectual humility that have really surprised you because they've been counterintuitive maybe? One thing is that that's kind of surprising is that so we could think about intellectual humility as something that's happening in your head and something that you can also like show to the world. So I can be aware that I don't know something, but am I going to admit that to you?

19:54Like something that is surprising to me is that we see sometimes if you're really, really like turned way up in terms of how aware you are of the stuff that you don't know, that can actually make you a lot less willing to show that to other people. It actually may make you a lot more nervous about expressing what you don't know. So it's getting into this question of what is intellectual humility and what's the opposite of it. At one end of the extreme, the opposite is something like rigidity, too much certainty. But there's another extreme we could talk about, which is like too much obsessing over what you don't know and getting kind of stuck in mired down with all of the limitations.

20:45And that's also not a good place. that's not really virtuous. It's not really helpful. It's just like an overactive attention to limitations. And I imagine it stops you from, it really can prevent you from taking any sort of action because you're like, well, I don't, I know that I don't know everything and maybe I don't know enough, so I shouldn't actually do this thing. I should stop and get more feedback and do more research. And, you know, you never get, you, you'll never know it all. So maybe you just never do anything. Exactly. In my family, we like to call this analysis paralysis. When it comes to intellectual humility at any age, what we want is the balance between something that is super rigid and something that is like super uncertain.

21:36We're trying to find something that's well calibrated. If you go to a conference, like when you go to like an academic conference on intellectual humility? Is it just everyone presenting and being like, well, I'm not sure about this, but I might be wrong. But here's an idea that I have. Is it just people like everyone's hedging their bets constantly and not actually saying a definitive statement because they're not positive that their research is actually totally sound? It's interesting that you should say that because I have had the experience of presenting on intellectual humility to people who don't study it.

22:06And I do think it has an effect on the audience such they become nicer. Their questions are kinder. They're a little bit like it puts them in this frame of mind. That's like, remember, you don't know everything and you might be wrong. So I really have experienced that. I do think it has an effect. You have a wonderful podcast voice. You also have a way of speaking that I'm wondering is if it's a chicken or an egg thing where it feels very intellectually humble in that you are thoughtful and you consider your words. You're not just like rapid fire spraying words out there like I am. And I wonder if that is, do you feel that you've started to think and speak differently as you learned more about intellectual humility?

22:49Or do you think that you always were kind of a thoughtful choosing your words speaker? And then that is maybe partly why you were drawn to this in the first place. I think it's both. I think it's both. And I think I was drawn to it. I've been kind of thoughtful, kind of careful, but it's way more, like way more since studying this. I will say something and then I'm like, do I really believe that? Is that really true? Huh? I'm not, you know, maybe I could see it from this other point of view. Are there ways to encourage intellectual humility in others without saying outright, you should have more intellectual humility?

23:27You have got to practice what you preach. So intellectual for me first and then intellectual humility for thee. So if you really want your brother who disagrees with you about politics to show intellectual humility to you, try showing it to him first and see what happens. It's not a guarantee, but it's going to work a lot better than yelling at him to be more humble. Yeah. I would have really loved it if on the plane when I was in the wrong seat, I would have been proven right. It was very painful to be that person who had to stand up and make everyone stand up and walk the road behind. I think naturally it feels better.

24:14But as I'm saying this, so this is the intellectual humility thing kicking in. So there's a psychologist named Frank Kyle, who's also studied intellectual humility. And I remember at a talk once, somebody was saying this, like, I just feel so bad when I'm wrong. I shouldn't have to feel good to learn that I'm wrong. And Frank was like, it's great to learn that I'm wrong. Like, I've learned something new. What a wonderful thing. I just discovered something new. I've made like this is learning. This is so exciting. And so maybe there are people out there who have reframed it in a way that it is like discovery.

24:54And maybe if we could all do that a little bit more, intellectual humility might become a little easier. Framing also makes me think about how a lot of these skills that are uncomfortable or painful at first are in some ways muscles, right? Like that you can strengthen them and they get better. I just think about for myself, one of the things that people ask the most frequently when they find out that I perform standup comedy is, oh, my God, have you ever bombed? Of course I've bombed. Some audiences would say that I've never stopped bombing. But what really has changed is like when you first perform and you get up there and you think you're going to say something funny and you say it and no one laughs.

25:29That first time is excruciating. It is so horrible. It's this real death of the ego. But if you're going to keep doing comedy over time, it gets easier because you've done it. So, you know, OK, I survive. And even though it's uncomfortable and awkward, it's mortifying for a day or for a week. But it goes away. The feeling of like that shame after doing it. And now I'm not going to say it's like this every time, but a lot of times if I tell a joke and it does not get any reaction from the audience, that is actually really just helpful information for me. Like, oh, something's not working about that.

26:07It's not information about me as a person. It's not like you're a terrible, disgusting, horrible human and you're horrible at your job. It's like, OK, maybe I worded that badly or maybe I didn't give enough context or maybe I'm just wrong that this is a universal thing that people can relate to. Like there's there's some information there that I can take away. I imagine without everyone being stand up comedians, there's similar exposure therapy or work and muscles and practice that you can do to feel like accepting your limitations or your intellectual limits isn't as painful as it is at first.

26:41I think that's absolutely right. And I believe pretty strongly that intellectual humility is really malleable. It is one of these things that we can develop through practice. I have met people who have really strong intuitions in the other direction. The idea that, well, people are, some people are kind of born this way and other people aren't and there's just nothing we can do about it. But this is one of those places where I'm going to stick to my conviction that training this is really possible and worthwhile. And if we can't learn, then we just end up being stuck where we currently are. And it's really exciting to push forward and progress and learn something new.

27:33We're going to take a quick break right now. This is a wonderful opportunity for everyone to learn something new about podcast ads.

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29:54And we are back. Today, we're talking with Dr. Tenille Porter about intellectual humility. So thinking about this, what are some things that people can do to build intellectual humility in themselves or to practice it in their daily lives? Yes. Great question. OK, what can they do? I'm like so much of my research is like about what can other people do to help other people develop it or what does it do when you have it? But OK, here's one. Here's one thing you can try to build intellectual humility. If you find yourself in a conflict and you see things differently than somebody else, you just disagree, take a step back, just remove yourself from the situation.

30:33And then imagine looking back on this situation from 20 years in the future. Or imagine that you are a fly on the wall watching this play out. Get some distance from the situation and then try to re-approach it. So this idea of like, when we get a little bit of perspective, it often just opens us up a little bit to intellectual humility. So that's one thing you can try. Another thing you can try to build intellectual humility is just remind yourself of the benefits of being this way. There's a lot in our culture that says intellectual humility is not good. It makes you look weak. It's not going to help you.

31:20But there's also a lot in our culture that says, no, this is a good way to be. This is a really good way to connect with other people. This is a good way to learn something new. This is an honest way to be because we are humans and no one is infallible. So remember the benefits. But three, if you're finding yourself in a place where you're really struggling to communicate, like see eye to eye with another person or even listen to them, you can just like take a moment again, remove yourself and just reflect on your values. Like what are some values that are really important to you? This is a technique that's used in brief interventions.

31:57It's also used in intensive psychotherapy values and action therapy and that kind of grounding in your values. And lots of people will say, like, my connections with friends and family are really important to me. It's a way of just getting in touch with what's important. It kind of anchors the self so that you're feeling in a way more secure to go back into that interaction and be able to listen to what the other person has to say without feeling really threatened and needing to protect and defend yourself. Okay? The fourth one, I'd say, is to put yourself into a kind of growth mindset. it. So this is this idea that growth and change are possible and good.

32:36You can grow in understanding. The other person can also change and grow in understanding. So believing the other person can change is helpful. But this kind of like emphasis on growth is something that we've learned helps people embrace intellectual humility. I imagine a lot of people who are parents, if they're listening to this, would say like, oh, well, intellectual humility, That's something I definitely would want my kid to have. I am not a parent and my heart goes out to all of you parents out there. And it's a wonderful job and it's really, really important. And I have friends and I have siblings with kids and they do worry about this, which is interesting, even about the humility thing specifically.

33:19So how can you encourage this in kids as a parent? I will always go back to the kind of practice what you preach. So find ways to model it. Say you're asked a question and you're not sure. Don't derogate the question or be like, how could anyone ever know? Or on the 15th why question, just lose your mind and give up. It's like, well, I'm not sure. I'm trying to model intellectual humility. I'm not sure. Maybe we can try to look it up together. So modeling is important. Celebrating intellectual humility. it's really hard for a kid to be vulnerable in certain settings and just be like I was wrong I got that wrong I don't understand I don't know like showing that to another person can be tough so when that happens that's a good thing to celebrate like wow I'm so like proud of how brave you are to admit that.

34:20That's a really good sign of character. I'm really proud of you for doing that. So celebrating when your child has humility is really important. I don't know if you've studied this, but I wonder if there's also a gender gap in intellectual humility. Because I certainly think that a lot of the ideas of what it means to be a man in society have to do with this decisiveness and certainty and not backing down. And I think that there's so many ways in which these strict gender roles trap men and don't allow them to grow or to be their full selves. That's super interesting. It's a great point. And what we see is that teenage boys are a lot more likely to endorse the idea that it's bad to show any kind of weakness.

35:16So if we look at boys and girls on that kind of survey item, the boys are like, I don't want to show weakness. And admitting you don't know something, if it's a sign of weakness, they think it is a sign of weakness, like it's not a good thing to do. So there definitely are gender dynamics working here. But what we also see, and perhaps this is linked to some research showing that girls and young women feel this pressure to be sort of perfect, is that when it comes to say, like, raising your hand to speak up in a class and say, I don't understand that, or I don't know what that is, when you're kind of showing that to the whole class and interrupting the class to take the class's time to do that, that's something that girls are much more hesitant about doing than boys are.

36:06We see that in lots of studies. So we find in those studies that when the teacher has modeled that humility first, girls become a lot more comfortable voicing their own questions in that setting. And that gap between boys and girls and how comfortable they are voicing their question closes. Yeah, it also makes me think that But if you're non-binary or if you don't fit into the spectrum, I imagine that that actually requires a little bit more intellectual humility because you just have to create some of your own path there. You have to be willing to imagine something that is outside of a yes or no.

36:44And I wonder if that would actually require more intellectual humility as well. But also then I can see the other side, right? You also have to have this definitive sense of, I know this to be true about myself. And even when everyone else is going to tell me something that's not right, I have to hold true to that. So I can see both ways. I think all of these, there's always these competing tensions, maybe. It's very intellectually humble of you to see it both ways. And this conversation is already taking effect. I like that. I think that you're right. And I think some of these conversations around gender are asking us to question categories that are really old and that have been pretty rigid and that, you know, that we can asking us to take another look at these categories.

37:30And I think there's real value in doing that. How would having more intellectual humility impact our society, right, on this larger level? How would it change the way that we live in our world if people across the board really embraced this and tried to cultivate this? I think if people really embraced this, we would see, we would literally see more progress. I think we would learn more because we would begin to stop holding so tightly to what we think is true. So we might question and push the boundaries further, which would allow us to progress. You know, right now we're going through a kind of trauma in the country as folks are divided.

38:14It's hard to even have a conversation with somebody who disagrees with you politically or on the other side of the aisle. And I think if we embrace intellectual humility, we find it's easier to get along and love each other. Danielle, thank you so much for being on the show. It's such a pleasure talking to you. Thank you so much. I'm really glad to have been here.

38:39That is it for this episode of How to Be a Better Human. Thank you so much for listening. If I got anything wrong, I apologize, and I will try to be intellectually humble about doing better in the future. Thank you so much to today's guest, Dr. Tennille Porter. I am your host, Chris Duffy, and you can find more from me, including my weekly newsletter and other projects, at chrisduffycomedy.com. How to Be a Better Human is put together by a team of intellectual giants. On the TED side, we've got Daniela Ballarezzo, Ban Ban Cheng, Chloe Shasha Brooks, Valentina Bohanini, Lainey Lott, Antonia Leigh, and Joseph Debrine.

39:10This episode was fact-checked by Julia Dickerson and Mateus Salas, who both epitomize the spirit of accepting and then correcting mistakes. On the PRX side, they are humble royalty Morgan Flannery, Nora Gill, Patrick Grant, and Jocelyn Gonzalez. Thanks again to you for listening. Please share this episode with a friend or a family member, someone you know who epitomizes intellectual humility or someone who desperately needs to learn more about intellectual humility. Either way, share it with them. Thank you for helping us to spread the word about this show. We will be back next week with even more How to Be a Better Human.

39:44Until then, take care.

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