Humility seems to be having its moment. Witness the pop culture tongue-in-cheek meme started by Jools Lebron about taking a “very demure, very mindful” approach to one’s appearance and behavior—a meme hilariously parodied by Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis.

But in all seriousness, there’s good reason to aim for intellectual humility in research and teaching. Turns out it’s good for boosting public trust in science and creating curious classrooms.

Let’s start first with the impact on students.

A new paper out in Development Psychology from Rowan University’s Tenelle Porter, New York University’s Andrei Cimpian, and Duke University’s emeritus Mark R. Leary looks at five studies of high school and college students that “tested the hypothesis that teachers’ expressions of intellectual humility would boost U.S. students’ motivation and engagement in learning.”

The authors found that, for college students specifically, modeling of intellectual humility by professors causally increases students’ interest in the class and their own willingness to express intellectual humility—defined as ”publicly admitting confusion, ignorance, and mistakes.” The authors conclude that modeling intellectual humility “may benefit students’ interest, engagement, and learning in school.”

Meanwhile, a new study by a team of four researchers published in Nature Human Behavior has found good reason for scientists to demonstrate intellectual humility in public. The researchers—from the University of Pittsburgh, Vanderbilt University, and the University of Vienna—found “that seeing scientists as higher in intellectual humility was associated with greater perceived trustworthiness of scientists and support for science-based beliefs.”

The team specifically looked at potential benefits in the areas of medicine, psychology, and climate science, but it seems likely these results would be replicated in other fields as well.

"When scientists fail to behave in ways that reflect intellectual humility, it might be especially detrimental and jarring, as it goes against both the fundamental norms of science and people's expectations for how a responsible scientist should act," the co-authors said.

Interestingly, “these effects were not moderated by the scientist’s gender or race/ethnicity.” In other words, it looks like all we scholars might help the world by being public more often about what we don’t know.

A 2018 report by Mark Leary of Duke University’s Department of Psychology and Neuroscience for the John Templeton Foundation explored how to define, measure, promote, and practice intellectual humility. Leary reviewed evidence showing that “scores on measures of [intellectual humility] correlate with measures of dogmatism. The more intellectually humble a person is, the less dogmatic they are.

Relatedly and perhaps not too surprisingly, original investigation by Heterodox Academy’s own research team has found that the students who self-identify as the most politically extreme are the ones most likely to voice their takes on controversial topics. A major finding of our most recent Campus Expression Survey of American undergraduates found that “the more strongly respondents described themselves as left or right-wing, the more comfortable they seem to be discussing controversial topics.”

Those in the majority politically-moderate middle displayed more reluctance to speak up. This finding has serious implications for learning in higher ed. Authors of the HxA report concluded, “If only the most ideologically extreme students are willing to discuss controversial topics on campus, then the quality of discussion is likely to suffer. Extreme partisans may be more prone to confirmation bias, less open to considering alternative viewpoints, and more likely to engage in motivated reasoning, leading discussions to degenerate into echo chambers rather than genuine exchanges of ideas.”

Ultimately, “To foster a healthy campus climate, it may be necessary to find ways to dampen the negative effects that extreme ideological commitment has on discussion, and encourage the sharing of questions, ideas, and perspectives from more moderate students.”

The more faculty lean into the virtue of intellectual humility—being aware of and owning the limits of our knowledge— the more good we might do with our teaching and research, including by earning the trust of our students and the general public.