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Using self-affirmation to increase intellectual humility in debate

Hanel, Paul H. P., Roy, Deborah, Taylor, Sam, Franjieh, Michael, Heffer, Christopher ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0922-5807, Tanesini, Alessandra ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6250-471X and Maio, Gregory R. 2023. Using self-affirmation to increase intellectual humility in debate. Royal Society Open Science 10 (2) , 220958. 10.1098/rsos.220958

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Abstract

Intellectual humility, which entails openness to other views and a willingness to listen and engage with them, is crucial for facilitating civil dialogue and progress in debate between opposing sides. In the present research, we tested whether intellectual humility can be reliably detected in discourse and experimentally increased by a prior self-affirmation task. Three-hundred and three participants took part in 116 audio and video-recorded group discussions. Blind to condition, linguists coded participants’ discourse to create an intellectual humility score. As expected, the self-affirmation task increased the coded intellectual humility, as well as participants’ self-rated prosocial affect (e.g., empathy). Unexpectedly, the effect on prosocial affect did not mediate the link between experimental condition and intellectual humility in debate. Self-reported intellectual humility and other personality variables were uncorrelated with expert-coded intellectual humility. Implications of these findings for understanding the social psychological mechanisms underpinning intellectual humility are considered.

Item Type: Article
Date Type: Published Online
Status: Published
Schools: English, Communication and Philosophy
Subjects: B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > B Philosophy (General)
B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology
P Language and Literature > P Philology. Linguistics
Publisher: The Royal Society
ISSN: 2054-5703
Date of First Compliant Deposit: 24 January 2023
Date of Acceptance: 22 December 2022
Last Modified: 02 Feb 2023 17:44
URI: https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/155318

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