When Is It OK to Be Wrong? (w/ Tenelle Porter) | How to Be a Better Human | TED

You're watching How to be a better human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy, and today on the show, we're talking about humility. Anyone who knows me knows that humility is not my strong suit. I have a big head, both literally, regularsized baseball cap. As you can see, it does not fit. It's also true metaphorically. I'm a comedian. I think strangers should be silent and listen to me talk while I'm on stage. I host a podcast called How to be a Better Human. Not the humblest of things to do. So, it's very important for me to talk to today's guest, Dr. Tanal Porter, a researcher who studies humility. That's going to be big for me personally. Tanal studies a specific kind of humility, intellectual humility, which is the idea that we might be wrong, that maybe we don't actually know it all, and I cannot wait for you to hear from Tanil about what it is that she's learned from studying this and how it can be applied in our lives. Maybe by the end, my head will have shrunk. Literally, probably not. figuratively. I mean, also probably not. Hi, I'm Dr. Tanal Porter and I am an assistant professor of psychology at Rowan University. So, Tal, let's start with the fact that you study intellectual humility. That is something that I think many people are probably not familiar with. So, what is 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. So, 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. Can you give me an example of like what it would look like to move from whatever the opposite of intellectual humility is, intellectual hubris maybe, um, into intellectual humility? For me, an experience that I've had occasionally is like being positive that there's only one way of seeing things, the world could exist and then learning that, oh, actually there are multiple possibilities here. And I imagine that's kind of a little bit of what this is, but I wonder if you have like a specific example that can illustrate this for people. I was taking an international flight. So I was flying to England on a redeye. 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. " It was just very clear that, oh, I'm in the wrong seat. I was totally wrong. I'm so sorry. Let me get up and everybody has to get up. And you may not have had that experience of something so simple of getting into the wrong seat on a plane. But every single person has had that experience of being like totally wrong about something cuz 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. philosophers have written about it as like something that we ought to be doing to have a good life. I 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. Right now I'm working on a different kind of measure um 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? Lots 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. So, how many, you know, reasons uh from a student who disagrees with you on this would you want to read? 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?

It's interesting. We're trying to learn about that still. So there's stuff that we don't know about that yet. But you know if you ask like a four-year-old how much do you know about trucks or why frogs look the way they do? A four-year-old is going to say I know everything about that. As kids get into school, they start to get better at calibrating how much they know and how much they don't know. And that accuracy is sort of like a nice trajectory that keeps getting higher and higher as they go through school. And there's this idea too that with teenagers that like, oh, this must be a period when the humility like hits the floor. That's not really what we see actually. Teenagers aren't any um more narcissistic uh than anybody else. They're actually a little bit better than super young kids at knowing what they know and what they don't know. Thinking about the whole lifespan. Yeah. Something that I've seen um in my data is that sometimes as people get older, they're more intellectually humble. It's almost like with experience you really come to just appreciate this fact of being a human being which is that 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. That's like extreme certainty. But I think that what you're saying here also makes me think about the interaction between confidence and humility. M 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. 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. Dil, you're you are a professor who is able to explain your work in a way that I think anyone would really be able to understand. 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. Sometimes people hide behind that and I think that is like a lack of confidence in themselves and in their research. Yeah. Well, that's a great compliment. That's the best compliment that I've received. 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. " 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 and you can ask someone, do you believe in ghosts? And the whole program I was listening to was 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 maybe you could show me something to convince me that ghosts are real, I would change my belief. Like this is a marker of intellectual humility. You know, 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. 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 cultural pressure to be rigid in your beliefs. I think that I do feel that. I especially feel that in online settings. I think that when it comes to interacting face to face that uh 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 um big cultural shifts or big context that can support intellectual humility for it to really thrive. 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? What could a regular person do? Um I try to model intellectual humility as a teacher. It really sets the tone for students and it really licenses them to be able to express that uncertainty or just take a risk to admit oh I don't know what does that mean? 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 especially when we're in those positions I don't know if power or influence like a teacher in a classroom that can be really powerful in setting

the tone for that whole context 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 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 separate from the group. That's like a big piece of at least my experience with teenagers and 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 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. So, there's this idea out there that maybe at this time of life when you need to be separating from your parents, like kind of breaking out on your own, that maybe what you need is like a really extreme confidence and kind of like a stride and see to help you make that difficult transition. Like 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. Either one of those could be true. So, I was curious, what would intellectual humility in a teenager actually do to them? So, we wanted to know, would intellectual humility relate at all to how successful they were in school? And we found intellectually humbler teenagers were doing better in school. They were learning more. They were more kind of persistent. So, if they got a bad test grade, they were like, "Okay, I'm not giving up. Like, I'm going to figure out what's going on and try harder next time. " They were more receptive to feedback 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. So, in a word, the intellectually humbler teenagers were learning more. any findings that you found about intellectual humility that have really surprised you because they've been counterintuitive maybe. 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? And something that is surprising to me is that we see sometimes if you're really 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. 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 mired down with all of the limitations. And I imagine it stops you from taking any sort of action cuz 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'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 just uncertain. We're trying to find something that's well calibrated. When you go to like an academic conference on intellectual humility, is it just everyone presenting and being like, "Well, I I'm not sure about this, but I might be wrong, but you I here's an idea that I have. " Is it just people like everyone's hedging their bets constantly and not actually like 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 and I do think it has an effect on the audience such that they become nicer. Their questions are kinder. They're a little bit like yeah 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 love that 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 like are thoughtful and you consider your words. Do you feel that you've started to think and speak differently as you learned more about intellectual humility or 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 and I think I was drawn to it. I've always 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? Are there ways to encourage intellectual humility in others without saying outright, you should have more intellectual humility? You have got to practice what you preach. 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. 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. 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, "But I just feel so bad when I'm wrong. " And Frank was like, "It's great to learn that I'm wrong. 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. And maybe if we could all do that a little bit more, intellectual humility might become a little easier. That 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? It must be so horrible to get up there and have no one laugh. " And what I always say is that like, of course, I've bombed. Some audiences would say that I've never stopped bombing. But uh I think 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, that first time is excruciating. And now 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. It's not like you're a terrible, disgusting, horrible human and you're horrible at your job. It's like there's some information there that I can take away. I imagine there's similar um exposure therapy or um work and muscles and practice that you can do to feel like accepting your intellectual limits isn't as painful as it is at first. I think that's absolutely right. 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 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 gonna stick to my conviction that training this is really possible and worthwhile and it's really exciting to like push forward and progress and learn something new. 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? 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 okay, 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 and 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. When we get a little bit of perspective, um 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. But 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. Three, if you're finding yourself in a place where you're really struggling to 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? Just 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. The fourth one I'd say is to put yourself into a kind of growth mindset. This is this idea that you 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 uh 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 I uh my heart goes out to all of you parents out there and it's a wonderful job and it's really important. So 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 like try 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. Like, 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 uh intellectual humility because I certainly think that um a lot of the ideas of what it means to be a man have to do with this like decisiveness and certainty and not backing down. And I think that strict gender roles don't allow them to grow or to be their full selves. It's a great point. And what we see is that on that kind of survey item, the boys are like, I don't want to show weakness and admitting you don't know something. They think it as 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 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. 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 um that gap between boys and girls and how comfortable they are voicing their question closes. Yeah. It also makes me think that, you know, if you're non-binary or if you don't fit into the spectrum, I imagine that actually requires a little bit more intellectual humility because, you know, you 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. Um, and I wonder if that would actually require more intellectual humility as well. But also then I can see the other side, right? Like you also have to have this like definitive sense of like I know this to be true about myself. And so I can see both ways. I think all of these right 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. Um I think that you're right and I think some of these conversations around gender are asking us to take another look at these categories and I think there's real value in doing that. How would having more intellectual humility impact our society? 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 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. It's hard to even have a conversation with somebody who disagrees with you if we embrace intellectual humility. We find it's easier to get along and love each other. Um Tamil, thank you so much for being on the show. Such a pleasure talking to you. Thank you so much. I'm really glad to have been here.