Research is uncovering the benefits of recognizing that you might be wrong, who tends to be more humble, and some hints about how to cultivate this skill.
Research on the overconfidence bias shows that people regularly overestimate their abilities, knowledge, and beliefs. For example, when researchers ask people how certain they are that their answers to questions of fact are correct, people’s confidence consistently exceeds the actual accuracy of their answers. Psychologist Scott Plous has noted that overconfidence is not only the most pervasive bias that plagues human thinking and decision-making, but it’s also the most “catastrophic” in that it leads to bad decisions and other negative outcomes.
The first step in dealing with overconfidence is for people to realize that much of what they believe to be true might, in fact, be incorrect. Psychologists call this awareness of one’s fallibility “intellectual humility.”
People who are intellectually humble know that their beliefs, opinions, and viewpoints are fallible because they realize that the evidence on which their beliefs are based could be limited or flawed or that they may not have the expertise or ability to understand and evaluate the evidence. Intellectual humility involves understanding that we can’t fully trust our beliefs and opinions because we might be relying on faulty or incomplete information or are incapable of understanding the details.
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