Intellectual Humility: The Ultimate Guide to This Timeless Virtue
Fortunately, we’re also evolved enough to consciously override the fight or flight mechanism that happens subconsciously.
Our brains may flinch at foreign people and their different ideas, but after that we have the conscious capacity to decide what to do next.
Will we disrespect the out-group and take away their power?
Or will we pause, and consider them and their ideas?
The upshot is when we encounter a viewpoint that doesn’t line up with what we currently think, we have an opportunity to evaluate whether we can learn and grow from it. But if we don’t have respect for things that don’t line up with our own thinking, it’s a nonstarter. We’ll be biased against the new information from the get-go.
So what exactly does it mean to respect someone with a different viewpoint? The concept of respect is generally framed in terms of what you don’t do, but it amounts to not taking away the person’s power to express themselves.
In other words, respect for other viewpoints includes:
Listening to viewpoints that are not your own without interrupting
Not disparaging or otherwise attacking the person behind any viewpoint, even if you don’t agree
Treating the person or viewpoint with the same kind regard that you’d treat your own ideas or self
In other words, respect is treating humans as inherently worthy of being considered no matter how good or bad we think their viewpoint is.
This is particularly hard to do when an idea we’re dealing with is abhorrent to us. Or when we’re dealing with a person who doesn’t have that same respect for others. It would be hard to sit down with Hitler and actually listen to his ideas without calling him an asshole. But you don’t have to agree with Hitler to be respectful. And you can even conclude that Hitler’s viewpoints are wrong and he needs to be locked up for his crimes, while still employing human respect.
Respect breaks down into two sub-categories:
Earned Respect is the kind of respect that we give people because they bring something valuable to the group. This is the kind of respect that people in our out-group can get from us—if they can prove they deserve it somehow.
Owed Respect is the default respect that we owe all human beings because they are humans. It’s being civil, listening, not being assholes to them. We tend to give more of this respect to our in-groups by default. Even if we’re generally disrespectful to everyone, we tend to give more respect to “our” people.
Neuroscience, psychology, and IH research show us a few hacks for getting Earned Respect for people we deal with in person. And they show us how we can be more humble with people or ideas we’re not dealing with face-to-face, by broadening our Owed Respect to generally include more kinds of people.
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Generating Earned Respect:
Here are three quick ways to generate respect for specific people who make us flinch, or whose ideas make us scratch our heads:
1. Unearth Moral Foundations
Dr. Jonathan Haidt of NYU (author of The Righteous Mind, and the new bestseller The Coddling Of the American Mind), is one of the pioneers in research on “moral psychology.”
His research on Moral Foundations digs into the underlying morals behind humans’ decisions. It explains in large part why good people can disagree so viciously on things like religion and politics.
In other words, it explains why I hear my good-hearted politically conservative, Mormon and Protestant friends back home in Idaho say the same thing that my good-hearted liberal, Atheist and Agnostic friends in New York say about them: “I can’t believe someone could believe in that!”
Haidt’s research says that we can develop respect for differing viewpoints if we make the effort to unearth their moral motivations.
Few people actually think of themselves as evil. So, unless you’ve got something wrong in your brain (e.g. you’re a malignant narcissist or a psychopath), you will tend to justify your decisions to help you feel like a “good” person. Under the surface, you’ll create good reasons for what you think.
Moral Foundations theory says humans share at least six innate moral foundations that serve as the universal building blocks of morality. For the most part, evolutionary psychologists and spiritual belief systems agree on these. They are:
Care. Being kind and preventing harm.
Fairness. Justice, and not cheating people.
Loyalty. Patriotism and self-sacrifice for the group, not betraying the group.
Authority. Deference to legitimate authority for the good of the group.
Sanctity. Striving to be noble, clean, and not contaminated.
Liberty: Rights, freedom, rejection of constraints and of oppression.
Studies show that we give our in-group lots of benefit of the doubt because we think “they’re good people.” We understand their underlying morals.
But we don’t afford our out-groups the same benefit of doubt. They might be “bad people,” so we justify not respecting them. (You can see this any time someone calls someone else a “liberal” or “right-wing” in a derisive way and implies through the label that the person is evil and therefore what they say is suspect.)
So, Haidt says, when we’re dealing with others, it pays to step back and identify the underlying morals they are operating from. Once we can isolate the moral values driving someone to think what they think, we can more easily respect them even if we disagree.
As a hypothetical example: Let’s say that my buddy back home and I disagree on a charged topic—like, what to do about immigration to the US.
Now, my buddy might make some common anti-immigration arguments about crime and economic impacts. He may say that people sneaking into the US burdens the system, and breaking the law to get here is wrong.
I might make a pro-immigration argument, saying it’s wrong to prevent people from living where they want to live. I may say that our immigration laws are unnecessarily cruel. I may point out that my best friend, my girlfriend, and my roommate are all immigrants, and that they make my life and this country better.
Underneath, what each of us is really doing is using post-hoc justifications to back up a moral intuition that we value most. And so as the argument continues, we’ll trot out statistics or stories that confirm our biases. We’ll tune out inconvenient evidence that calls our particular stance into question. The fact that my Brazilian best friend pays hella taxes, and my Guatemalan girlfriend makes everyone around her a better person might be dismissed by my buddy’s anecdote about a foreign gang member shooting someone in Texas.
We may not even realize it, but we’re not respecting or considering each other’s arguments while we’re so busy defending our own. This conversation likely won’t go anywhere, and is likely to leave us disliking each other.
But say we forced ourselves to dig out the moral motivations behind our immigration stances. We might end up unearthing this:
My buddy values Fairness and Authority above all else. So he thinks it’s not fair that some people can break the law and get away with it (entering the country illegally). Even if the law is a little cruel, breaking the law is a betrayal to society. And he thinks it’s not cool to disrespect the Authority of a country by breaking it’s laws, even if the law is not cool. Finally, my buddy might be worried about the Sanctity of the country. Letting in anyone means we might let some bad guys in, too. It’s good to not risk contaminating the swimming pool, he’d say.
Once we unearth this, I can acknowledge that my buddy’s motivations are good, even if I disagree with his conclusions. After all, I can get down with Fairness and Authority too. Even though those aren’t my primary morals, I understand that my buddy is coming from a place of trying to do the right thing.
In contrast, I can help him see how I value Care and kindness above all else. If he’s listening, he’ll agree that that’s a good thing, too. I can explain how I think we should treat people like they’re valuable no matter where they were born. This explains why I think restricting immigration the way we do is unkind. And he might be surprised to discover that I also value Fairness. The way I see Fairness in the case of immigration is that it’s not fair to tell one human they can live here and another they can’t. We don’t choose where we were born, and I think it’s unfair to restrict someone for that.
So we both value Fairness, we just apply it in different ways.
Once we unearth these moral foundations, even if we still don’t agree on a conclusion, we have earned respect each other’s viewpoint. I see my buddy as a good person. He has good moral motivations behind his arguments. And he sees the same in me.
This means we might be able to have a more productive conversation about what to do. We might just be able to employ the next three parts of IH and get somewhere together.
As Dr. Haidt summed it up in his first TED talk “A lot of the problems we have to solve are problems that require us to change other people. And if you want to change other people, a much better way to do it is to first understand who we are—understand our moral psychology, understand that we all think we’re right—and then step out, even if it’s just for a moment, step out of the moral matrix, just try to see it as a struggle playing out, in which everybody does think they’re right, and everybody, at least, has some reasons—even if you disagree with them—everybody has some reasons for what they’re doing.”
2. build empathy through Storytelling
In the final chapter of Dream Teams I explore one of the most surprising recent discoveries in neuroscience: how stories help our brains develop empathy.
The short version of the science is this: Our brains pay special attention to stories, engaging more areas of the mind than when we hear or see facts. And when we learn a good story, our brains synthesize the neurochemical oxytocin. This helps us feel others’ emotions and empathize with them. Scientists have shown that high oxytocin levels—whether we snort it or get it naturally through hearing a story—lead us to donate more to charity, be more interested in people’s well-being, and have more respect for “others” who aren’t like us.
As Dr. Paul Zak, one of the world’s leading oxytocin researchers put it to me in an interview: “Oxytocin melts the in-group, out-group divide.”
In other words, if we want to develop earned respect for someone, it’s a pretty good idea to sit down and hear their personal story.
In recent years, companies as big as Blackrock (the world’s largest investment management firm) have caught on to this. They’ve started using personal storytelling as a way to get people to get along better when they don’t see eye to eye at work. Importantly, in these “storytelling interventions,” people are encouraged to identify the emotions they felt in their stories. This helps generate even more of that oxy. (tocin, that is!)
I experienced this effect a few years ago at my last startup company. We had hired a VP to run sales, and after a few months it became clear that she and I did not see eye-to-eye on some things. I soon found myself trying to find fault with anything she proposed. I questioned her motivations. And I am ashamed to admit that I even started treating her rudely in meetings and emails.
Things changed dramatically after I somehow ended up at a dinner at this VP’s house. As I remember it, I mentioned at work to the team that I wasn’t going home to Idaho for Thanksgiving, and she extended an invite to me and whoever else didn’t have a place to go. I felt like I couldn’t say no, so I showed up. And at dinner, I met her sister. I saw her baby pictures. We cooked together. We sang karaoke in the living room. I learned her story of growing up in the south, how her father was a captain in the Air Force (just like a family member of mine), and how much she loved and missed her family.
After that, it was like a switch had flipped. I found myself saying hi to her at work and actually being happy about it. I started considering her ideas in meetings, backing her up in person and standing up for her when she wasn’t around. We still were very different, but she had turned into someone who I respected—and I ended up learning from her a great deal.
I’m going to her wedding in the Spring. All because I learned her story.
Blackrock bigwig Jonathan McBride (formerly the head of staffing for the Obama White House) put it to me well in an interview last year. “You need people to care about each other,” he said, if you want them to respect their different viewpoints. “And how you get people to care is through emotional narrative.”
3. Bring People Into The “Magic Circle” Through Play
I once made friends with a scary homeless man in Philadelphia. (You can read the story in this free bonus chapter of my book.) All it took was a game of chess.
Whereas at first the man’s appearance made me not want to go near him—much less listen to anything he might have to say—after playing chess for an hour, I found that, inexplicably, I was no longer afraid of him. In fact, I decided I loved the guy. He had gone from my out-group to part of my in-group. I later learned from psychology research that this was precisely because we played together.
Researchers have found over and over that play builds bridges between people from different walks of life. It explains how anti-Semitism dropped in Argentina when Jewish kids started playing soccer with Christian kids. It explains how this 22 year old rapper became real-life pals with an 80 year old lady because of Words With Friends. And it explains how we can hack the in-group/out-group psychology and earn respect for people like us.
In a nutshell, play and humor put us in a sort of “magic circle” where everyone who’s in on the game is psychologically “safe” for the moment. Subconsciously, play simulates a situation of anxiety, only our brains know there’s no actual danger. This is how we learn to handle stress, so when the danger is real we can handle our shit. Cats play with each other to learn how to hunt. Monkeys and lemurs play together in order to get less scared of other monkeys and lemurs.
When we step out of the magic circle, studies show that we’re more likely to respect the people we played with. This in turn helps us to respect their viewpoints.
For more on this, check this great post by Charlie Hoehn about using play to overcome anxiety, or Chapter 3 of Dream Teams.
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Building Owed Respect:
We’re not always going to be able to deal with the individuals behind the viewpoints we encounter. So while it’s great to use the above tactics of unearthing moral foundations, learning each other’s stories, and playing together, what about when we come across information that we don’t like, presented by people we don’t know? Ideally, we ought to be able to explore ideas that don’t jibe with our own so that we can determine whether we need to change our minds because of it. But we can’t even dig into the validity of a viewpoint if we don’t have basic owed respect in the first place.
Building owed respect—i.e. Expanding your in-group to include more of humanity, including people you don’t know—boils down to training your brain to see other people as part of your family, and therefore just as valid as you are.
In the same way that a big family like mine (I’m the first of seven kids) with lots of different viewpoints can sit down for Thanksgiving and be nice, a person who develops a broad in-group can sit down and listen and treat other people’s viewpoints more easily than others.
This translates to more possibilities for creativity (considering broader arrays of ideas increases our chances of coming up with new solutions to problems) and more productive collaborations.
The best way to build this kind of owed respect is to reinforce the idea in our brains that there can be more than one “right” way to do something. IH research indicates that there are three simple ways to do this:
1. Live Abroad
Psychologists have found that people who have lived in other countries are more likely to be creative—which means that their brains are more open to considering ideas that are outside of the expected.
My IH study found that living in lots of different countries or states (enough that you’ve likely had to truly immerse yourself in cultures outside of your own) or living in another country for at least 3 months (enough to have to actually slot into the other country’s way of living and not just Vacation Mode), correlated with a small but real boost in Respect For Viewpoints.
2. Read And Watch Fiction
Another surprise from the IH study is that people who read a book every month (or more), or people who watch a couple hours a day of TV, tend to score higher on Respect For Viewpoints.
Knowing the neuroscience of storytelling makes the likely reason for this obvious, because what is fiction, if not stories of people who aren’t like us? Those stories unlock empathy (hello oxytocin!) and reinforce the idea that other people can have valid lives and ideas even if they’re not like us.
A series of studies published in 2014 by a group of Italian psychologists found that reading Harry Potter significantly reduced people’s prejudices. High school and university students who read the books were more likely to have respect for people in their out-groups—in particular immigrants and refugees—than average.
Curiously, my IH study didn’t find any correlation between reading news and Respect For Viewpoints. News is good for being informed, but not for building respect, it would appear.
3. Learn More Languages
Brain scans show that multilingual people have physically different brains than people who speak just one language. And these studies show that multilingual people’s brains generally gain an advantage in problem solving and focus. People who can speak more languages generally gain the capacity to look at things from more angles, studies show, and they tend to have a higher chance of being more creative.
While there’s not much research directly studying the links between multilingualism and IH yet, any easy hypothesis to make based on these observations is that the more your brain can reinforce the idea that there’s more than one “right” way to speak, the better our ability to consider that there might be more than one valid way to think about other ideas, too. In other words, it’s not a stretch to say that having multiple languages in your head builds your respect for other viewpoints.
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