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Funded Projects
Track 1 - Mechanisms
Adam Fetterman
University of Houston
Adam Fetterman is an associate professor at the University of Houston. He received his B.A. in Psychology, Criminal Justice, and Human Relations and Multicultural education, at St. Cloud State University, in St. Cloud Minnesota. He then moved to Fargo, North Dakota, where he completed his M.S. and Ph.D. in Social/Health Psychology at North Dakota State University. From there he was off to Tübingen, Germany, where he spent two years as a postdoctoral researcher at the Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien. After his time in Germany, he moved to Colchester, England, where he was an assistant professor at the University of Essex and then moved to the University of Texas at El Paso, before moving to his current position at the University of Houston. He was named a Rising Star from the Association for Psychological Science in 2020. Adam's research interests lie at the intersection of social, personality, and cognitive psychology. Utilizing methods from these fields, he focuses on the science of identity, understanding, and belief. A major area of research involves investigating an intellectually humble behavior called "wrongness admission." Additional areas of research include metaphor use, nostalgia, science denial, religion and atheism, doomsday prepping, political ideology, stereotyping and prejudice, cultural identity and diversity, and language analysis.
Project
Promoting Wrongness Admission by Targeting Reputation Concerns, Social Learning, and Perspective Taking
Wrongness admission is an intellectually humble behavior in which a person publicly expresses that they held and then subsequently changed an inaccurate belief or attitude. While people avoid engaging in wrongness admission because they fear negative reputational outcomes, recent research suggests that this fear is unwarranted. Indeed, wrongness admission confers reputational benefits. Wrongness admission, and intellectual humility more broadly, can also make dialogue more friendly, humble, and productive, and reduce the spread of misinformation. Therefore, it is imperative to find ways to increase instances of wrongness admission in dialogue. Given the social barriers to wrongness admission, this project targets three social mechanisms for enhancing wrongness admission. The first is social approval. Specifically, two studies will investigate whether those scoring high (vs. low) in intellectual humility perceive a reputational barrier to wrongness admission and whether informing people of the reputational benefits of wrongness admission will lead to further admissions. The second is social modeling. Here, two studies will investigate whether witnessing a social model engage in wrongness admission is infectious, leading to more wrongness admission. The third is perspective taking. Two studies will investigate whether daily experiences of perspective taking predict wrongness admissions and whether a perspective taking intervention increases wrongness admissions. In all studies, we will also investigate whether these interventions impact wrongness admission in vivo by measuring people’s behavior over a week after their participation. Finally, we will test whether trait levels of intellectual humility and the willingness to engage in wrongness admission impact the efficacy of the interventions. It could be that these interventions are particularly useful for those low in these traits. Overall, this project has the potential to inform applied research on intellectual humility by targeting the specific mechanisms that might hinder its instantiations. Our approach leverages insights from social, personality, and industrial/organizational psychology and philosophy.
Anat Perry (Co-PI)
Anat Perry is an associate professor at the Psychology department, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she established the University’s Social Cognitive Neuroscience Lab. Before joining the Hebrew University, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. Perry studies various facets of empathy and related social processes through the prism of social cognitive neuroscience. Three pressing questions motivate her research. (1) First, what are the behavioral and brain mechanisms that underlie social psychological phenomena, specifically those relating to empathy and understanding others? (2) Second, what overlap or divergence exists between social and non-social cognitive processes? (3) Finally, how can answers to the previous two questions help us understand deficits in social cognition (e.g., autism, social anxiety, psychopathy)? Her research combines theoretical insight with a broad set of research techniques in order to elucidate the methods by which we empathize with others.
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Project
How Intentional Listening Fosters Intellectual Humility
Polarization in attitudes is growing worldwide, toward various core issues such as immigration, climate change, and religious and political views (McCarty et al., 2016). This social polarization further affects how people think, listen, and communicate with others. Forming virtuous habits like intellectual humility could serve as a possible remedy for this problem. In the words of investor and philanthropist Sir Templeton, “[People] should be eager to learn, to listen, to research and not to confine, to hurt, to kill, those who disagree with them.” Just as disagreements tend to escalate and spread, we propose that the opposite can occur – by teaching people to listen, they might become more willing to change and grow, and become more intellectually humble. In a line of three studies, utilizing various methodologies, designs, and paradigms in the lab and in the field, we will examine the effects of intentional listening on intellectual humility. In addition to self-reports, we will examine these effects using behavioral indicators of intellectual humility, focusing on both dyadic effects and long-lasting individual effects.
Michal Lehmann
(Early Career Co-PI)
Michal Lehmann is a post-doctoral researcher at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research focuses on exploring the intricacies of humility from a dyadic perspective, and delves into the causes, outcomes, and boundary conditions of virtues in the workplace, with a special emphasis on how humility can enhance one’s understanding of people from diverse backgrounds. She is the lead author on a paper about dyadic humility among co-workers published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, as well as a paper about listening as an intervention to increase humility published in the Journal of Positive Psychology.
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Project
How Intentional Listening Fosters Intellectual Humility
Polarization in attitudes is growing worldwide, toward various core issues such as immigration, climate change, and religious and political views (McCarty et al., 2016). This social polarization further affects how people think, listen, and communicate with others. Forming virtuous habits like intellectual humility could serve as a possible remedy for this problem. In the words of investor and philanthropist Sir Templeton, “[People] should be eager to learn, to listen, to research and not to confine, to hurt, to kill, those who disagree with them.” Just as disagreements tend to escalate and spread, we propose that the opposite can occur – by teaching people to listen, they might become more willing to change and grow, and become more intellectually humble. In a line of three studies, utilizing various methodologies, designs, and paradigms in the lab and in the field, we will examine the effects of intentional listening on intellectual humility. In addition to self-reports, we will examine these effects using behavioral indicators of intellectual humility, focusing on both dyadic effects and long-lasting individual effects.
Gregory R. Maio
Prof Greg Maio received his formal education in Canada (BSc at York University, MA, PhD at Western University), began his academic career at Cardiff University in Wales, and is now at the University of Bath, England. He has published widely in psychology on the topics of human values, attitudes, prejudice, and family relationships. He was a Senior Associate Editor for Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (2006-2008), and is the author of “The Psychology of Attitudes and Attitude Change” (with G. Haddock and B. Verplanken, 2010, 2015, 2018), and “The Psychology of Human Values” (2017).
University of Bath
Project (Co-PI)
Using Values to Increase Intellectual Humility among Political Partisans
Using a coding framework developed by an interdisciplinary team across psychology, philosophy, and linguistics, we have previously found that the affirmation of personal values increases intellectual humility in subsequent in-person debate (Hanel et al., 2023). The present project takes a further leap forward by interrogating the mechanisms through which human values can be leveraged to enhance intellectual humility in online political debate, as viewed through an integrative interdisciplinary lens.
To begin, we will initiate a dialogue between philosophical research on values and virtue and social psychological accounts of value and attitude. This activity will commence with workshops including global experts in philosophy and psychology. They will discuss different theoretical perspectives on the notion of value, its relations to character strengths, virtues, and intellectual humility, especially as these are manifested in political life. We will also complete an extensive interdisciplinary literature review of values and their relation to virtues and character.
At the same time, we will conduct three large-scale pre-registered experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of value-affirmation interventions to improve intellectual humility during online political debate. Specifically, we will seek to establish (a) how strong an effect on intellectual humility can be reliably produced and replicated by these interventions, (b) their effectiveness in comparison to a novel, extended intervention that additionally reveals similarities in values between political groups to the participants, (c) the maintenance of these effects over time, and (d) the psychological mechanisms that underpin change (e.g., dependency on value type, moderating factors such as trait humility).
By the end of the project, we will have built an interdisciplinary community of researchers poised to extend this important and internationally relevant avenue of research, while delivering substantive new insights into the theoretical and empirical relationship between values and intellectual humility.
Alessandra Tanesini
.
Cardiff University
Project (Co-PI)
Using Values to Increase Intellectual Humility among Political Partisans
Using a coding framework developed by an interdisciplinary team across psychology, philosophy, and linguistics, we have previously found that the affirmation of personal values increases intellectual humility in subsequent in-person debate (Hanel et al., 2023). The present project takes a further leap forward by interrogating the mechanisms through which human values can be leveraged to enhance intellectual humility in online political debate, as viewed through an integrative interdisciplinary lens.
To begin, we will initiate a dialogue between philosophical research on values and virtue and social psychological accounts of value and attitude. This activity will commence with workshops including global experts in philosophy and psychology. They will discuss different theoretical perspectives on the notion of value, its relations to character strengths, virtues, and intellectual humility, especially as these are manifested in political life. We will also complete an extensive interdisciplinary literature review of values and their relation to virtues and character.
At the same time, we will conduct three large-scale pre-registered experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of value-affirmation interventions to improve intellectual humility during online political debate. Specifically, we will seek to establish (a) how strong an effect on intellectual humility can be reliably produced and replicated by these interventions, (b) their effectiveness in comparison to a novel, extended intervention that additionally reveals similarities in values between political groups to the participants, (c) the maintenance of these effects over time, and (d) the psychological mechanisms that underpin change (e.g., dependency on value type, moderating factors such as trait humility).
By the end of the project, we will have built an interdisciplinary community of researchers poised to extend this important and internationally relevant avenue of research, while delivering substantive new insights into the theoretical and empirical relationship between values and intellectual humility.
Rick Hoyle
I am Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience and Director of the Center for the Study of Adolescent Risk and Resilience at Duke University. I completed doctoral work at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in social and quantitative psychology. I was on the faculty at the University of Kentucky for 14 years prior to coming to Duke, where I have been for 20 years. My work on personality processes and problem behavior during late adolescence and emerging adulthood has been continuously funded by NIH since 1995. Additional work, funded by The John Templeton Foundation and The Duke Endowment, has focused on indicators of adjustment and well-being, with a particular emphasis on characteristics that reflect a healthy understanding of self in relation to others (e.g., intellectual humility). I publish regularly in peer-reviewed journals and have written or edited multiple books, including Selfhood: Identity, Esteem, Regulation (with Kernis, Leary, and Baldwin), Handbook of Personality and Self-regulation, Handbook of Individual Differences in Social Behavior (with Leary), and Handbook of Structural Equation Modeling (2nd ed.). I am a Fellow of the American Psychological Association (Divisions 1, 5, 8, and 9), the Association for Psychological Science, and the Society for Experimental Social Psychology.
Duke University
Project
Metacognitive and Cognitive Mechanisms That Enable Intellectual Humility
The overarching goal of the program of research is to investigate metacognitive and cognitive mechanisms that contribute to intellectual humility when one’s personal views are met with alternative views. We will study these mechanisms in a 2.5 year program of research using multiple methods to study samples from multiple populations during a period of time when people will regularly be exposed to views that differ from their own—the U.S. general election.. Collectively, the studies will produce process-relevant information about the focal mechanisms and descriptive information about experiences in daily life that engage those mechanisms. At a practical level, the research aims to identify metacognitive and cognitive targets for interventions designed to increase intellectual humility.
The multimethod approach taken across six studies will generate a wealth of new information on psychological processes engaged when personal views are challenged. The studies focused on mechanisms will suggest targets for evidence-based interventions that aim to increase the likelihood of intellectual humility in response to challenges to personal views. An additional study will evaluate the efficacy of a pilot intervention targeting a cognitive mechanism assumed to contribute to intellectual humility. Findings from the research will be the basis for several tangible outcomes, including new measures of mechanisms that contribute to intellectual humility; multiple published papers, including a theory paper focused on mechanisms; multiple presentations at national conferences; and at least one publication directed to the general public.
Spike W. S. Lee
Trained as a social psychologist, I am an associate professor cross-appointed in Management and Psychology at the University of Toronto.
We live in a time where political polarization, class differences, moral debates, antiscience attitudes, and technological advances pervade our daily lives. I am committed to disentangling the psychological roots of ideology, partisanship, social class, moral intuitions, and science denialism.
Overall, my work uses multiple methods (e.g., meta-analysis, computational analysis, psychophysiology, experimental and correlational designs) to provide scientific answers to an overarching question in the philosophy of mind: How do human beings accomplish abstract thinking? I am especially eager to understand how people process various abstract thoughts that matter in sociopolitical conflicts (e.g., antiscience attitudes, morality), that are common in daily life (e.g., stress, love), that are culturally enshrined (e.g., independence), that emerge early in human development (e.g., gender), or that have significant consequences in real-world contexts (e.g., decision making, economic behavior, fake news).
I have been publishing my theoretical, empirical, and methodological work in journals such as Science, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Nature Human Behaviour, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Psychological Bulletin, Psychological Science, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and Behavior Research Methods.
University of Toronto
Project
Enhancing Intellectual Humility Requires Contextualized Motivation, Contextualized Ability, and Contextualized Practice: Mechanisms and Intervention in the Political Domain
We live in an era of political sectarianism. To ameliorate partisan hatred, intellectual humility has been heralded as an important avenue for intervention. But how do we do it?
We argue that people need to have the right (a) motivation, (b) ability, and (c) practice—all cultivated in political contexts—to become intellectually humble. These mechanisms, unfortunately, face unique challenges in the political domain. Political discussion motivates partisans to engage in zero-sum competition, to prioritize taking action over thinking critically, to pursue social goals rather than truth-seeking goals. People’s political views are often infused with powerful moral convictions that obfuscate their ability to recognize biases in their own moral convictions and limitations in their own thoughts. Without the right motivation and ability, people typically lack the kind of personalized, repeated practice necessary for forming a sustained habit of intellectual humility in political discussion.
Our work seeks to tackle these challenges in two parts. Part 1 will systematically examine the proposed mechanisms. To operationalize intellectual humility in the political domain, participants’ responses to political tweets will be content-analyzed for attributes of intellectual humility, using both human coding and state-of-the-art natural language processing techniques.
Part 2 will involve an intervention design contest. The winning entry will be evaluated against a multicomponent intervention we design by leveraging the mechanisms supported in Part 1. To test the effectiveness and robustness of both interventions, Twitter users will be recruited to participate in a longitudinal randomized controlled trial. Participants’ behavior on Twitter will be tracked and content-analyzed for intellectual humility in response to political (and non-political) tweets.
Overall, our work seeks to advance scientific and public understanding of how to enhance intellectual humility in an intellectually, emotionally, and societally high-stakes domain. It will pave the way for ameliorating conflicts and animosity in our politically fractured reality.
Tania Lombrozo
Princeton University
Trained as a social psychologist, I am an associate professor cross-appointed in Management and Psychology at the University of Toronto.
We live in a time where political polarization, class differences, moral debates, antiscience attitudes, and technological advances pervade our daily lives. I am committed to disentangling the psychological roots of ideology, partisanship, social class, moral intuitions, and science denialism.
Overall, my work uses multiple methods (e.g., meta-analysis, computational analysis, psychophysiology, experimental and correlational designs) to provide scientific answers to an overarching question in the philosophy of mind: How do human beings accomplish abstract thinking? I am especially eager to understand how people process various abstract thoughts that matter in sociopolitical conflicts (e.g., antiscience attitudes, morality), that are common in daily life (e.g., stress, love), that are culturally enshrined (e.g., independence), that emerge early in human development (e.g., gender), or that have significant consequences in real-world contexts (e.g., decision making, economic behavior, fake news).
I have been publishing my theoretical, empirical, and methodological work in journals such as Science, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Nature Human Behaviour, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Psychological Bulletin, Psychological Science, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and Behavior Research Methods.
Trained as a social psychologist, I am an associate professor cross-appointed in Management and Psychology at the University of Toronto.
We live in a time where political polarization, class differences, moral debates, antiscience attitudes, and technological advances pervade our daily lives. I am committed to disentangling the psychological roots of ideology, partisanship, social class, moral intuitions, and science denialism.
Overall, my work uses multiple methods (e.g., meta-analysis, computational analysis, psychophysiology, experimental and correlational designs) to provide scientific answers to an overarching question in the philosophy of mind: How do human beings accomplish abstract thinking? I am especially eager to understand how people process various abstract thoughts that matter in sociopolitical conflicts (e.g., antiscience attitudes, morality), that are common in daily life (e.g., stress, love), that are culturally enshrined (e.g., independence), that emerge early in human development (e.g., gender), or that have significant consequences in real-world contexts (e.g., decision making, economic behavior, fake news).
I have been publishing my theoretical, empirical, and methodological work in journals such as Science, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Nature Human Behaviour, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Psychological Bulletin, Psychological Science, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and Behavior Research Methods.
Trained as a social psychologist, I am an associate professor cross-appointed in Management and Psychology at the University of Toronto.
We live in a time where political polarization, class differences, moral debates, antiscience attitudes, and technological advances pervade our daily lives. I am committed to disentangling the psychological roots of ideology, partisanship, social class, moral intuitions, and science denialism.
Overall, my work uses multiple methods (e.g., meta-analysis, computational analysis, psychophysiology, experimental and correlational designs) to provide scientific answers to an overarching question in the philosophy of mind: How do human beings accomplish abstract thinking? I am especially eager to understand how people process various abstract thoughts that matter in sociopolitical conflicts (e.g., antiscience attitudes, morality), that are common in daily life (e.g., stress, love), that are culturally enshrined (e.g., independence), that emerge early in human development (e.g., gender), or that have significant consequences in real-world contexts (e.g., decision making, economic behavior, fake news).
I have been publishing my theoretical, empirical, and methodological work in journals such as Science, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Nature Human Behaviour, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Psychological Bulletin, Psychological Science, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and Behavior Research Methods.
Tania Lombrozo is the Arthur W. Marks ‘19 Professor of Psychology at Princeton University, as well as an Associate of the Department of Philosophy and the University Center for Human Values. She previously served as a Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. She received her Ph.D. in Psychology from Harvard University in 2006 after receiving a B.S. in Symbolic Systems and a B.A. in Philosophy from Stanford University. Dr. Lombrozo’s research aims to address foundational questions about cognition using the empirical tools of cognitive psychology and the conceptual tools of analytic philosophy. Her work focuses on explanation and understanding, conceptual representation, categorization, social cognition, causal reasoning, and folk epistemology. She is the recipient of numerous early-career awards including the Stanton Prize from the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, the Spence Award from the Association for Psychological Science, a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation, and a James S. McDonnell Foundation Scholar Award in Understanding Human Cognition.
Project
Promoting Intellectual Humility about Politics through
Probabilistic Thinking
Intellectually humble believers acknowledge their own ignorance and fallibility. This project develops the idea of intellectually humble belief by drawing on a distinction with roots in philosophy and psychology: the distinction between binary belief (i.e., believing something versus not believing it) and probabilistic belief (i.e., believing with some level of strength or confidence). The motivating idea behind the proposed research is that probabilistic belief both reflects and promotes intellectual humility. This is because probabilistic belief – by virtue of recognizing uncertainty and implicitly representing the possibility of being wrong – has the potential to both reflect and promote recognition of one’s own ignorance and fallibility.
The proposed research investigates the relationship between probabilistic belief and intellectual humility in the domain of politics. Intrapersonally, political beliefs are often held in a dogmatic or close-minded fashion, with resistance to engaging opposing arguments and evidence. Interpersonally, political beliefs can support affective polarization: negative attitudes towards those who hold opposing views. Our research explores whether promoting probabilistic belief promotes intellectual humility, and whether doing so can in turn support people’s willingness to engage with other views (as reflected in openness to belief revision) and with the people who hold those views (as reflected in reduced affective polarization).
Characterizing the relationships between probabilistic belief, intellectual humility, openness to belief revision, and affective polarization is important for a number of reasons. Theoretically, our proposed work has the potential to inform theories of belief by developing a pluralist approach to belief representation, and accounts of intellectual humility by articulating the representational basis for different metacognitive attitudes to belief. Practically, this work has the potential to identify domain-general and scalable interventions to promote intellectual humility. This is especially pressing in the domain of politics, where increasing political polarization threatens the basis for constructive disagreement on which democracy thrives.