How Humility Can Restore Trust in Expertise
Who would you trust: an expert who seems to have all the answers or who admits what he doesn’t know? We have spent the last five years studying this issue and the many ways that people can react.
Our research was triggered by a recurring tension that we both noticed at the start of our university career. Our higher studies have deeply aware of the little that we knew in our respective areas of research, even if we have developed knowledge specialized in these fields. The researchers call this particular variety of self -awareness “intellectual humility”, and this is something that we suspect that many experts meet when they move to a new role.
On the other hand, almost no one seemed to expect what we be Humble intellectually in our positions of the time. People seemed to engage with us as Know-it-All, Capital-e experts Who could respond with confidence to all the questions that were even bound to our specialties. The most frightening part was that we could easily have exploited these opportunities to share our opinions on subjects far beyond our expertise.
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These experiences made us think about the importance of humility among experts. It is possible to have confidence in what you know, but being true on the limits of your knowledge is also important, even if it is not always encouraged. Research has linked intellectual humility to many desirable behaviors, in particular considering the perspectives of others, being better in conflict resolution and being less dogmatic. Conversely, when experts claim to know more than they really do, it is not only a betrayal of confidence, but also potentially disastrous in terms of promoting healthy public discourse.
Given these high issues, we decided to study how people think of expertise and humility. We have discovered that, in fact, many people assume a real expert “knows everything” – even if it is very unlikely. We propose that that encourage others to enhance intellectual humility in experts could be essential to correct this trend.
We have designed a series of studies to understand how people think of experts. Our first was a simple investigation. We asked 100 paid participants (recruited via an online research platform) to freely describe their understanding of expertise. In our next study, we have analyzed around 200 publications on Twitter (now X) linked to experts at the start of the cocovio pandemic. And in our third study, we asked 700 online participants to tackle a sorting task in which they identified and grouped different terms (such as “knowledge” or “qualifications”) from broader perspectives on expertise.
In these studies, our results suggest that most people assume that exceptional knowledge is a decisive characteristic of expertise. The idea that expertise is defined by problem solving and obtaining results was also a recurring trend, as well as the conviction that training and special education are at the heart of expertise.
At first glance, these understanding of the expertise seem obvious and benign. There is nothing wrong with using identification information and a demonstration demonstrated to overcome the problems to assess someone’s position as an expert. Our concern, however, is that relying on these criteria can leave certain vulnerable people to perceive expertise among those who do not appear Know their business – in other words, those who simply project confidence. Many research has shown that the link between trust and competence is far from simple. From this point of view, the definition of expertise largely in terms of knowledge and capacities can ironically make people more vulnerable to follow those who simply project these qualities rather than real experts.
We argue that humility is a trait that deserves to be valued as much as competence when you think of experts. In our data sets, a small part of the respondents linked expertise to intellectual humility. A participant wrote on how experts are people who come to “the humble achievement that you will always be a student and that there is much more to learn”. Or, as a Twitter user said, “an expert’s revealing sign is that if he doesn’t know something, he will say.”
Our studies have also shown that the expectations of experts are omniscient could contribute to important problems. For example, people could develop unrealistic expectations with regard to expert people, resulting in disappointment, anger or resentment when they do not inevitably manage to meet these expectations. Some of the tweets that we gathered during the pandemic highlighted such frustration, with a person writing “your” experts “killed thousands of people.”
After our first studies, we wanted to deepen the attitudes towards the humble experts, we therefore designed and conducted an online experience with 200 managers. We asked our participants to watch one of the three videos. A video highlighted the value of a humble expert. Another represented the advantages of a very confident expert and things to do. And the third acted as a control that simply focused on negotiation styles. After watching the videos, we asked our participants to imagine themselves in collaboration with an open and transparent legal specialist on the limits of his expertise. Subsequently, our participants evaluated the specialist on various criteria, measuring the extent to which they saw him as an expert.
We found that showing people a relatively short and simple video that explained the virtues of a humble expert led these participants to assess the sticker specialist more strongly than the participants who watched the other videos.
In a second, an experience based on a scenario, we asked 240 managers with hiring experience to watch their respective videos, then examine a candidate’s package for a sustainability of sustainability in a (fictitious) organization. Some of the applications have described the candidate as very confident and assured. Others have presented someone humble and will open on their limits. Like the first experience, our videos could push people to recognize a particular candidate as more (or less) of an expert, depending on the video they consulted.
In future research, we want to see if it is possible to create more substantial changes in the way people understand expertise – changes that last for weeks, months and potentially years. We want to know if helping people write intellectual humility in experts could make them better to detect when someone ventures beyond the limits of their expertise.
In the spirit of humility, we must also recognize the limits of our work. Our research is not a perfect solution for people’s vulnerability to experts who claim to know everything. But in the end, this suggests that we can move people’s thoughts to experts to create environments that write and promote intellectual humility. This seems particularly precious, given the potential for intellectual humility to help experts acquire confidence and trust.
Our research gives us hope for our company and the state of engagement of experts. People can and have a nuanced understanding of expertise, and it is possible to help people go from a simplistic understanding of what makes experts an expert to experts. Part of the solution can reside in the valuation of intellectual humility in itself. Interestingly, researchers have recently discovered that young children tend to see intellectually humble people like more pleasant and more intelligent than those who are arrogant. A change towards the valuation of unjustified confidence on humility can therefore occur later in life.
Although humility is not the first quality that most people consider when they think “experts”, companies can take measures to strengthen this mental link. This can ensure that the humble experts, who are aware and transparent on the limits of their expertise, are there to help humanity meet the most urgent and urgent challenges of our world.
Are you a scientist specializing in neuroscience, cognitive sciences or psychology? And have you read a recent article evaluated by peers that you would like to write for Mind Matters? Please send suggestions to American scientistThe editor of the spirit of the Daisy Yuhas Spirit dyuhas@sciam.com.
