Whom would you trust more: an expert who seems to have all of the answers or one who admits what they don’t know? We have spent the past five years studying that question and the many ways people may respond.
Our research was sparked by a recurring tension we both noticed early in our academic careers. Our graduate studies made us deeply aware of how little we knew about our respective research areas, even as we developed specialized knowledge in these fields. Scholars call this particular variety of self-awareness “intellectual humility,” and it’s something we suspect many experts encounter as they transition into a new role.
On the other hand, barely anyone seemed to expect us to be intellectually humble in our then new positions. People seemed to engage with us as know-it-all, capital-E experts who could confidently answer any questions that were even remotely related to our specialties. The scariest part was that we could have easily exploited these opportunities to share our opinions on topics well beyond our expertise.
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These experiences got us thinking about the importance of humility among experts. There is value in having confidence in what you know, but being truthful about the limits of your knowledge is also important, even if it’s not always encouraged. Research has linked intellectual humility with many desirable behaviors, including considering others’ perspectives, being better at conflict resolution and being less dogmatic. Conversely, when experts claim to know more than they actually do, this is not only a betrayal of trust but also potentially disastrous in terms of promoting healthy public discourse.
Given these high stakes, we decided to study how people think about expertise and humility. We discovered that, indeed, many people assume a true expert “knows all”—even though that’s highly unlikely. We propose that encouraging others to value intellectual humility in experts could be critical to correcting that tendency.
We designed a series of studies to understand how people think about experts. Our first was a simple survey. We asked 100 paid participants (recruited through an online research platform) to freely describe their understanding of expertise. In our next study, we analyzed about 200 posts on Twitter (now X) that related to experts during the onset of the COVID pandemic. And in our third study, we asked 700 online participants to tackle a word sorting task in which they identified and grouped different terms (such as “knowledge” or “qualifications”) into broader perspectives on expertise.
Across these studies, our results suggested that most people assume that exceptional knowledge is a defining feature of expertise. The notion that expertise is defined by solving problems and getting results was also a recurring tendency, as was the belief that specialist training and education are central to expertise.
At first glance, these understandings of expertise seem obvious and benign. There’s nothing wrong with using credentials and a demonstrated record of overcoming problems to evaluate someone’s position as an expert. Our concern, however, is that relying on these criteria alone may leave some people vulnerable to perceiving expertise in those who only appear to know their stuff—in other words, those who simply project confidence. Much research has shown that the link between confidence and competence is far from straight forward. From this standpoint, defining expertise largely in terms of knowledge and capability may ironically make people more vulnerable to following those who simply project these qualities rather than actual experts.
We argue that humility is a trait worth valuing just as much as competence when thinking about experts. Across our datasets, a small portion of respondents linked expertise with intellectual humility. One participant wrote about how experts are people who come to the “humble realization that you’ll always be a student and there is a lot more to learn.” Or, as one Twitter user put it, “A tell-tale sign of an expert is that if they don’t know something, they will say so.”
Our studies also showed that expecting experts to be all-knowing might contribute to significant problems. For example, people could develop unrealistically high expectations of those in expert roles, leading to disappointment, anger or resentment when they inevitably fail to deliver on those expectations. Some of the tweets we gathered during the pandemic pointed to such frustration, with one person writing, “Your ‘experts’ have caused 1000s to die.”
After our initial studies, we wanted to dig deeper into attitudes around humble experts, so we designed and conducted an online experiment with 200 managers. We asked our participants to watch one of three videos. One video highlighted the value of a humble expert. Another depicted the upsides of a highly confident, gets-things-done expert. And the third acted as a control that simply focused on negotiation styles. After they watched the videos, we asked our participants to imagine themselves collaborating with a legal specialist who was open and transparent about the limitations of his expertise. Afterward, our participants rated 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 those participants to rate the specialist in the vignette more highly than those participants who watched the other videos.
In a second, scenario-based experiment, we asked 240 managers with hiring experience to watch their respective videos and then review an application package from a job candidate for a sustainability specialist in a (fictional) organization. Some of the applications portrayed the candidate as highly confident and assured. Others presented someone humble and open about their limitations. Much like the first experiment, our videos could push people to recognize a particular candidate as more (or less) of an expert, depending on the video they viewed.
In future research, we want to see if it’s possible to create more substantial changes in how people understand expertise—changes that endure for weeks, months and potentially years. We want to know whether helping people prize intellectual humility in experts might make them better at detecting when someone is venturing beyond the boundaries of their expertise.
In the spirit of humility, we also need to acknowledge our work’s limitations. Our research is not a perfect fix for people’s vulnerability to experts who claim to know all. But ultimately, it suggests that we can shift people’s thinking about experts to create environments that prize and foster intellectual humility. Doing so seems especially valuable, given the potential for intellectual humility in helping experts gain public trust and confidence.
Our research gives us hope for our society and the state of expert engagement. People can and do hold nuanced understandings of expertise, and it’s possible to help people move from simplistic understandings of what makes an expert to more thoughtful ones. Part of the solution may lie in valuing intellectual humility in and of itself. Interestingly, researchers have recently found that young children tend to see intellectually humble people as nicer and smarter than those who are arrogant. A shift toward valuing unwarranted confidence over humility may therefore happen later in life.
Although humility is not the first quality most people consider when they think “expert,” societies can take steps to strengthen this mental link. Doing so can ensure that humble experts, who are aware of and transparent about the limits of their expertise, are there to help humanity tackle our world’s most urgent and pressing challenges.
Are you a scientist who specializes in neuroscience, cognitive science or psychology? And have you read a recent peer-reviewed paper that you would like to write about for Mind Matters? Please send suggestions to Scientific American’s Mind Matters editor Daisy Yuhas dyuhas@sciam.com.