Intellectually humble people are able to recognize and admit to the limitations of their knowledge. They tend to be more open-minded, discerning, and respectful of others, which is helpful when communicating across polarized groups who can’t seem to talk to one another in any productive way.
This suggests that intellectual humility could be a virtue worth cultivating, especially in children—who, after all, will grow up to be the citizens of tomorrow. But how do we teach them to recognize its value? In fact, a new study discovered that they already do, and from quite a young age.
In this study, a diverse group of 229 four- to eleven-year-old children were asked how they felt about a humble versus a more arrogant adult figure. In an initial experiment, 111 children were presented with an ambiguous object (e.g., something that could be a sponge or a rock) or an ambiguous word (e.g., “bat,” which could be an animal or sports equipment). Then, the children heard two adults (either two women or two men) answer questions regarding the object or word, including what it was, how sure they were about their identification, and if they were open to it possibly being something else.
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Each adult initially identified the object or word in the same way. But the humble person said they were “pretty sure” they were right, but that the word or object could be something else, while the more arrogant person said they were definitely sure they were right and it couldn’t be otherwise. The researchers were careful not to make either adult seem less amiable than the other.
After viewing these interviews, the children rated who they thought was smarter and nicer, and whom they liked more and would rather learn from. By analyzing their responses, the researchers found that children five and a half years and older preferred humble people to arrogant people in every way, with that preference growing stronger with every additional year of age. Children younger than five and a half years showed no preference between humble and arrogant adults.
This suggests that children as young as five and a half recognize the value of intellectual humility, says researcher Shauna Bowes of Vanderbilt University—a good thing if we’re interested in promoting it.
“If kids don’t like intellectual humility and we’re telling [adults] to go do it, that might be a barrier to cultivating it,” she says. “So, the fact that kids do prefer intellectual humility over intellectual overconfidence or arrogance shows that maybe we can start signaling this pretty early in life.”
Still, she wasn’t sure if the kids in this first experiment valued humility, specifically, or if they just recognized the humble person was being more accurate (since the objects and words were ambiguous). So, Bowes and her team re-ran the experiment with another 118 kids, replacing ambiguous objects and words with ones that were nonsensical (didn’t exist in real life). The results were nearly the same: Children older than five and a half years preferred humble, uncertain adults to arrogant, certain ones—though the preference was not as strong.
For Bowes, this shows that when it comes to learning, being accurate matters to kids, but so does humility.
“This challenges the idea that if you’re really certain, people think you’re really smart and like you more,” she says. “Someone who tends to be over-confident also tends to be unlikable.”
Interestingly, neither the gender of the child nor the gender of the two adults answering questions affected the children’s preference. This surprised Bowes, who thought that a child’s gender might influence how they viewed adults of the opposite gender. But both young boys and girls valued humility—a heartening result.
However, Bowes adds, outside of a lab setting, social signaling might affect those results. For example, if the humbler adult was a woman and the arrogant adult was a man (or vice versa), the children might have made different assessments, influenced by gender expectations. This is a factor worthy of future research, she says.
But for now, Bowes’s findings suggest that children could benefit from adults modeling intellectual humility at younger ages than previously thought. For example, elementary school teachers could express uncertainty in situations where the answer isn’t clear, nudging kids toward staying open and digging deeper into ambiguous topics. Similarly, parents could model humility with even their young children, encouraging them to grapple with complex ideas while also strengthening their parent-child bond.
“To be able to express this kind of humility with your child in terms of small interactions and also bigger conversations that we know parents are having with kids early on—about politics and race and religion and things like that—could be very powerful,” says Bowes.
Whether children valuing humility will translate into them becoming humbler in the long run is hard to say, says Bowes. But she’s hopeful that when adults model intellectual humility, children learn that no one has all of the answers and that admitting you don’t know something doesn’t affect your authority. Perhaps teaching humility to children will eventually help build bridges in our currently polarized society, says Bowes.
“There is power in saying, ‘I’m not entirely sure and my knowledge is fallible and so is yours; maybe we can come together and talk,’” says Bowes. “I think the earlier in life kids learn to do this, the better.”
