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Intellectual humility is an essential virtue for our time, but cultivating intellectual humility in students involves a tricky conundrum.

If we hope that someday we will have a public discourse in which people take competing viewpoints seriously, intellectual humility is indispensable. Intellectual humility disposes us to off-set the ego in ways that make other intellectual virtues possible, especially virtues like open-mindedness, intellectual thoroughness, and intellectual generosity.

But it is hard to talk about intellectual humility directly without sounding like a wet blanket. Encouraging others to question their confidence in what they believe is not likely to make you very popular at parties.

And it seems especially hard to talk about intellectual humility with students. As teachers and librarians, we hope to build our students’ confidence to explore new ideas through research. If we tell students to be more humble about what they know, are we undercutting their confidence?

Recent literature on the philosophy of intellectual virtue includes some debate on the question of humility and confidence in one’s beliefs. Duncan Pritchard conceives of intellectual humility as respect for the perspectives of other people.^[1] He argues that this notion of intellectual humility is completely compatible with firm convictions. After all, you don’t need to agree with someone in order to take them seriously and treat them with respect.

But Michael Hannon and Ian James Kidd say, “not so fast.”^[2] They point out cases in which intellectual humility tends to soften convictions on political questions. Hannon and Kidd work from a more inwardly-focused notion of intellectual humility as a disposition to examine weak spots in one’s knowledge and adjust the firmness of one’s beliefs accordingly. For Hannon and Kidd, the sheer complexity of most political questions will lead humble people to acknowledge aspects of the question that they do not understand completely. As a result, humble people will modulate their level of conviction on at least some political questions.

These studies explore the connection between intellectual humility and the firmness of one’s beliefs. I want to take the discussion in a slightly different direction to consider the connection between intellectual humility and research confidence. Is there a way to encourage intellectual humility without undermining students’ research confidence?

A classic way to understand intellectual virtue is to think about virtue as an excellence that lies between two extremes. This framework applies well to intellectual humility as it applies to research. One extreme would be overconfidence. Gross and Latham have studied undergraduate overconfidence as it applies to
research.^[3] The attitude toward research that they describe runs as follows: Research is pretty easy. You just search up some sources, write about what they say, and you’re good to go. I don’t think many expert researchers would describe research in this way.

At the opposite extreme is a paralyzing sense of lowliness in which we minimize our abilities as a researcher: I’m not smart enough, focused enough, or organized enough to do this research. Why should I even try?

A virtuously humble researcher works between these two extremes. They are realistic about their abilities and about the challenges that research involves, but they won’t overestimate the challenges (or underestimate their abilities) to the point of discouraging genuine effort. This realistic position is where we want students to be. How do we get them there?

In my one-shot library instruction classes, I tend not to bring up the concept of intellectual humility directly – there just isn’t time. Instead, I try to frame library research as a matter of making progress rather than positioning oneself as an expert. In other words, I present an understanding of research with humility baked in. I emphasize two elements of this humble notion of research:

• A clarified understanding of research arguments, and
• A realistic sense of how much students can expect to learn about their research question over the course of a semester.^[4]

Teachers and librarians talk about arguments A LOT, but our students may not fully realize that we are using the term in a specialized sense. The everyday sense of argument is a discussion that you try to win. Courtroom dramas, inflammatory discourse in political media, and squabbles with one’s family members all reinforce the idea that an argument is successful only if you convince the other person of your position. Confidence helps you persuade others that you are right.

This confrontational sense of argument also colors the way that we talk about research and writing in a classroom context. Show that you are a good sport by including a source with a counterargument. Win the argument, but show that you can play fair by letting the other side have a turn.

But a research argument is something different. A research argument is a matter of using evidence and reasoning to develop a plausible conclusion to a research question. Research arguments sometimes succeed by settling the research question, but more frequently they succeed by helping us understand something about the question that we had not noticed before. Research arguments are less about convincing the audience and more about helping the audience build their understanding. It is ok for research arguments to point out questions that remain to be answered. Research arguments include nuance and become more thorough as you put more time into them.

Thinking about time and research arguments brings me to my next point. Humility involves comparing oneself with others in realistic ways. For first-year composition classes, I encourage realism by asking students to think about how much they think they will know about their research question by the end of the semester. How will their level of knowledge compare to that of the average person? How will it compare to the level of a research specialist who has devoted years or even decades to research in that area? My point is that it is realistic for students to expect to know more than someone who hasn’t studied the question, but they still won’t know as much as an expert who has built their career on studying that question.

Since most students are just getting started with their research question, it is more realistic to steer them toward building a research argument and away from building an argument that they hope to win. Setting lower, more realistic expectations for making progress with their research question clears space for approaching research with humility. It is ok if students still have unanswered questions at the end of their research project. Actually, having questions is preferable, because it shows that students are thinking like researchers.

Ideally, students will show a humble appreciation for their progress. They can say that they have built their knowledge considerably, but they are still on the road to achieving expertise.

Intellectual Humility and Research Confidence: Encouraging Undergraduates by Mark Lenker

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