The right way to know you might be wrong (w/ Tenelle Porter) (Transcript)

Please note the following transcript may not exactly match the final audio, as minor edits or adjustments could be made during production.

Chris Duffy: You are listening to How to Be a Better Human. I am your host Chris Duffy. One thing about me is that no one has ever accused me of having a small head. I have a big head, both literally, in that I have trouble finding hats that fit and figuratively in that I think that I should stand on stage and have audiences of strangers listen to me talk.

And I host a podcast called How to Be a Better Human. Humility, not really my strong suit. Today's guest, Tenelle Porter, is a professor and a researcher who studies humility. She's an important person for me to talk to, but Tenelle studies a very specific kind of humility, intellectual humility, and that's actually a term that I had never heard of before meeting her, and now it's one that I cannot stop thinking about.

Intellectual humility seems to me like it is the key piece that is missing from so many conversations in the world today. It really feels like this is something that more people need to know about. And here's how Tenelle defines intellectual humility.

Tenelle Porter: Intellectual humility means understanding what you don't know, and recognizing that you might be wrong.

Of course all of us think that we're right and sometimes we are right, but that feeling of being right is, is a subjective experience, and it doesn't always match reality. So intellectual humility is really about understanding that our knowledge is partial, that nobody knows everything there is to know, and therefore we sometimes get things wrong.

Chris Duffy: If there's one thing that I'm a pro at, it is getting things wrong now. I think we did get something right when we booked Tenelle on the show today, and I'm so excited that we're gonna get to talk to her about why knowing that you get things wrong is one of the most important things that you can get right.

Tenelle Porter: Hi, I'm Dr. Tenelle Porter, and I am an assistant professor of psychology at Rowan University.

Chris Duffy: So let's, let's start with the fact that you study intellectual humility. That is something that I think many people are probably not familiar with, but I wonder if you have like a specific example that can illustrate this for people.

Tenelle Porter: Yeah, I can think of one recently. So. Uh, I was taking an international flight, so I was flying to to England on a red eye. I got settled into my seat. I was in a window seat, and we were just about done with boarding. The last few people were coming on and a woman came on the plane and kind of stood outside my row and said, you're in my seat,

And I said. No, I'm not. I'm in 34A. And then the woman in the middle seat said, well, I'm in 33B. And then it was just very clear that, oh, I'm in the wrong seat. I was totally wrong. I'm so sorry. Let me get up. And everybody has to get up. And you may not have had that experience of something so simple of getting into the wrong seat on a plane, but

Every single person has had that experience of being like totally wrong about something. 'cause we're humans and that's part of what it is to be human.

Chris Duffy: It also seems to me like this is a field of study that I would've imagined was kind of intellectually interesting in the past, and now feels like directly relevant to our everyday lives and survival of our species and societies.

Tenelle Porter: So holding space for the possibility that we might be wrong is not a new idea. It's been with us for a really long time. Scientists have written about it for thousands of years. Philosophers have written about it as like something that we ought to be doing to have a good life. I think what's new now is that we're trying

Or starting to study it scientifically, but it of course has bearing in so many different contexts and domains.

Chris Duffy: How do you study this scientifically?

Tenelle Porter: We try to measure intellectual humility or we try to do experiments that will kind of change how intellectually humble people are or feel comfortable being, and it's in a certain context.

So people take a questionnaire. Right now I'm working on a different kind of measure. Where we're actually gonna take. High school students and ask them what they think about cell phone bands. So should they be allowed to have their cell phones in classes? Lots of high school students have really strong opinions on this issue, as you might imagine, and instead of asking them to say like, how humble do you think you are about this issue, we're gonna ask them to actually engage with perspectives that don't agree with them.

With theirs. So how many, you know, reasons from a student who disagrees with you on this, would you wanna read? And, um, we'll look at their behavior on this computer task and use that to measure how intellectually humble they are.

Chris Duffy: Are there ages or phases where we are more intellectually humble, or is it kind of one of those things where we have this moment at the beginning of our lives and then afterwards, we just have to really work hard to become humble again?

Tenelle Porter: It's interesting. We're trying to learn about that. Still. So there's stuff that we don't know about that yet, but, but sometimes, you know, if you ask like a, like a 4-year-old, how much do you know about trucks or how much do you know about this Really? Like why frogs look the way they do. A 4-year-old is gonna say, I know everything about that.

I know everything . But as. Kids. And just like you're saying, and I know you're a teacher, as kids get into school, they start to get better at calibrating how much they know and how much they don't know, and they become more accurate. And that accuracy is sort of like a nice trajectory that keeps getting higher and higher as they go through school.

So they're getting better at it and. There's this idea too that with teenagers that like, oh, this must be a period when the humility like hits the floor. Like I don't even know if they're capable of being humble. That's not really what we see. Actually, if you look at all the data, teenagers aren't any more narcissistic, uh, than anybody else.

So they're actually a little bit better than super young kids at knowing what they know and what they don't know.

Hmm.

Tenelle Porter: And then thinking about the whole lifespan. Yeah. Something that I've seen in my data is that sometimes as people get older, they're, they're more intellectually humble. It's almost like with experience, you really come to just appreciate this fact of being a human being, which is that, you know, to be human is to error.

We're all fallible.

Chris Duffy: What is the opposite of intellectual humility? Is there a term for that?

Tenelle Porter: The opposite of intellectual humility is intellectual rigidity. That's like extreme certainty. But I think that what you're saying here also makes me think that, it sort, sort of makes me think about the, the interaction between confidence and humility.

Hmm. It's like this idea that can you be confident and intellectually humble at the same time? I. And I think that the answer is yes, and I think that for a lot of people, you even have to have a certain amount of confidence to be able to show intellectual humility. It's like, I'm so confident that I'm willing to be vulnerable in this way, that I am wrong or I don't understand that, or something.

I don't know what that is. Tell me more about that.

Chris Duffy: Yeah, it makes me think too, you know, speaking to you. Yeah. Right now, Tenelle, you're, you are a professor who is able to explain your work in a way that I think anyone would really be able to understand and I think that I've talked to a lot of, of scientists and professors, weirdly, I've had a career where I've interviewed a lot of scientists and professors, and I always think that that's really like a mark of confidence, right? Of confidence in your work and in your mastery of the field. Because it's really easy in academia to hide behind jargon, hide behind, you know, complex ways of saying simple things and making it so like, well, you couldn't possibly understand.

Because I've done all this research and I've done so many years of schooling to say something that, you know, someone else could understand if you said it more simply, but sometimes people hide behind that, and I think that is like a lack of confidence in themselves and in their research.

Tenelle Porter: Yeah. Well, that's a great compliment.

That's the best compliment that I've received.

Chris Duffy: I, I also think e even putting the, the confidence or confidence aside, it's so much more pleasant to be with someone who can just say, I actually don't know. Rather than saying like, you know, giving a a five minute monologue to obscure the fact that they don't know is never a fun conversation.

Tenelle Porter: Agreed. And I think something we're seeing with intellectual humility is that it's one of these things that does really help relationships. I was listening to something the other day, and it was about this test that you can ask on a first date. It's a test via a question you can ask someone. . Do you believe in ghosts?

And the whole program I was listening to is about how the answer to this question will tell you a lot about the person. So if they answer like, no, absolutely not, I do not believe in ghosts and there's no information that you could ever provide to me to show me, but ghosts are real. They're like really rigid.

You're learning something that like, this is gonna be like a kind of black and white thinking person, but if they're like I don't actually believe in ghosts right now, but if like potentially maybe you could show me something to convince me that ghosts are real, I would change my belief like this is a marker of intellectual humility.

Chris Duffy: When you think about intellectual humility in that way, which is that you can be really rigid on one side or really rigid on the other, but then somewhere in the middle is this more flexible, intellectually humble state. Um, for me, at least, a very natural, a comparison that that brings up is political beliefs or, or this spectrum of like, what must be true.

And it feels to me like we are in a, a cultural moment where there's very little cultural capital in having flexibility and there's quite a lot of rewards and cultural pressure to be rigid in your beliefs?

Tenelle Porter: Yeah, I think that I do feel that, I think that I especially feel that in online settings and social media interactions or I think that when it comes to interacting face-to-face, that we're not as sort of dogmatic and rigid as we appear online.

And what this makes me think. As to what extent we need big cultural shifts or big context that can support intellectual humility for it to really thrive. I think that changing some of those environments would be really impactful.

Chris Duffy: So like what could a regular person do to create more environments for

Intellectual humility to thrive, both in themselves and also in the interactions they have.

Tenelle Porter: Mm-hmm. This is what I try to do. I try to model intellectual humility as a teacher. It really sets a tone for students and it really licenses them to be able to. Express that uncertainty or just take a risk to admit.

I don't know what that means.

Hmm.

Tenelle Porter: When I have said, you know, I know a lot about this topic, but I don't know everything there is to know, or you actually know this thing that I don't know, so you can help me understand that. I think that especially when we're in those positions, I don't know if of power or influence like a teacher in a classroom, that can be really powerful in setting the tone for that whole context.

Chris Duffy: We're gonna take a quick break and then we will be right back.

And we are back. Going back to, um, teenagers, 'cause you brought up teenagers before. I, I know you did a really important study on intellectual humility with teens. I feel like that same thing is a real skill that many people are learning in teenage years, which is that there are, I. Different paths. Things aren't necessarily like all black and white, and that you're figuring out what your story is versus what other people's story are and whether you want to be part of the group or want to be separate from the group.

That's like a big Yeah. Piece of at least my experience with teenage years and it felt like people around me. Can you talk to us both what you did with the study on teenagers and then also why you picked that particular age?

Tenelle Porter: I'll start with the second one. I. Pick that particular age because I care about teenagers.

I worked with teenagers when I was in college as a youth mentor, and it's just the stage of life that I think is really challenging and really rich, so much is happening that it fascinated me. I, I also think it was just a really important time in my own life, like some of the most formative, just like core values and.

Beliefs that I have. I think were forged in adolescence and young adulthood. So there's this idea out there that maybe at this time of life when you need to be separating from your parents and like making it like kind of breaking out on your own and you have this really strong urge to break out on your own, then maybe what you need is like a really extreme like confidence and kind of like a stridency.

To help you make that difficult transition, like this is the way it is. Like, ah, this is gonna help me break out. That's one story that we tell ourselves about teenager hood. Another story that's possible is like, well, maybe it helps teenagers to be a little bit more flexible and open and intellectually humble about what they believe.

Either one of those could be true. So I was curious, would you know what . What would intellectual humility in a teenager actually do to them? Like would it make their lives worse, or would it make their lives better, or somewhere in between? And we looked at it in school. Graduating from high school is one of these really important milestones, and that looks like from the data to

It set you up to like be on a path to have a longer life and a healthier life. So succeeding in school is pretty important for kids at this age. So we wanted to know would intellectual humility relate at all to how successful they were in school? And we found intellectually humbler teenagers were, were doing better in school, they were learning more, and they were more kind of persistent.

So if they got a negative feedback or a bad test grade, they were like, okay, I, I'm not giving up. Like I'm gonna redouble, figure out like change code, whatever, figure out what's going on and try harder next time. They were more receptive to feedback. So say they get some negative feedback on an, on an essay or something, they're like, uh, that could have, that could be a good point.

And they're more likely to kind of incorporate that feedback and a revision going forward. And all this culminates in earning higher grades. Which is a marker of learning. So in a word, the intellectually humbler, teenagers were learning more, seemed to help them in school. So that's, that's like one study.

I'm not sure if there's, uh, other stuff. No,

Chris Duffy: that's great. That's really helpful. Okay. And are there any things, any findings that you found about intellectual humility that have really surprised you because they've counterintuitive? Maybe

Tenelle Porter: one thing is that. That's kind of surprising is that, so we could think about intellectual humility as something that's happening in your head and something that you can also like show to the world so I can be aware that I don't know something, but I.

Am I gonna admit that to you? Like, something that is surprising to me is that we see sometimes if you are really, really like turned way up in terms of how aware you are of the stuff that you don't know, that can actually make you a lot less willing to, to show that. To other people, it actually may make you a lot more nervous, about expressing what you don't know.

So it's getting into this question of what is intellectual humility and what's the opposite of it at one? Then the of the extreme, the opposite is something like rigidity. Too much certainty. But there's another extreme we could talk about, which is like too much obsessing over what you don't know.

Getting kind of stuck in, mired down with all of the limitations.

Tenelle Porter: And that's also not a good place. That's not really virtuous. It's not really helpful. It's just like an overactive attention to limitations. And I imagine

Chris Duffy: it stops you from, it really can prevent you from taking any sort of action.

'cause you're like, well I don't, I know that I don't know everything and maybe I don't know enough, so I shouldn't actually do this thing. I should stop and get more feedback and do more research and you know, you never get you, you'll never know it all. So maybe you just never do anything.

Tenelle Porter: Exactly. In my family, we like to call this analysis paralysis.

When it comes to intellectual humility at any age, what we want is the balance between something that is super rigid and something that is like super uncertain.

Chris Duffy: Hmm.

Tenelle Porter: We're trying to find something that's well calibrated.

Chris Duffy: If you go to a conference, like when you go to like an academic conference on intellectual humility, is it just everyone presenting and being like, well, I am, I'm not sure about this, but I might be wrong.

But you, I, here's an idea that I have. Is it just people, like everyone's hedging their bets constantly and not actually like saying a, a definitive statement because they're not positive that their research is actually totally sound.

Tenelle Porter: It's interesting that you should say that because I have had the experience of presenting on intellectual humility to people who don't study it, and I do think it has an effect on the audience, such they become nicer , their questions are kinder.

They're a little bit like, it puts 'em in this frame of mind that's like, remember, you don't know everything.

Tenelle Porter: I love that. And you might be wrong. So I really have. Experience that I do think it has an effect.

Chris Duffy: You have a, a wonderful podcast voice. You also have a, a way of speaking that I'm wondering is if it's a chicken or an egg thing where it feels very intellectually humble in that you like are thoughtful and you consider your words.

You're not just like rapid fire spraying where it's out there like I am, and I wonder if that is, do you feel that you've. Started to think and speak differently as you learned more about intellectual humility? Or do you think that you always were kind of a thoughtful choosing your words speaker and then that is maybe partly why you were drawn to this in the first place?

Tenelle Porter: I think it's both. I think it's both. And I think I was drawn to it. I've always been gonna thoughtful. I'm kind of careful. Mm-hmm. But it's way more like way more. Since studying this, I will say something and then I'm like, do I really believe that? Mm-hmm. Is that really true? Huh, I'm not, you know, maybe I could see it from this other point of view.

Chris Duffy: Are there ways to encourage intellectual humility in others without saying outright, you should have more intellectual humility.

Tenelle Porter: I. You have got to practice what you preach. So intellectual for me first, and then intellectual humility for these. So if you really want your brother who disagrees with you about politics to show intellectual humility to you, try showing it to him.

First and see what happens. It's not a guarantee, but it's gonna work a lot better than yelling at him to be more humble. Yeah, I would've really loved it if on the plane, when I was in the wrong seat. I would've been proven, right? Mm-hmm . It was very painful to be that person who had to stand up and make everyone stand up and walk the row behind.

I think naturally it feels better, but as I'm saying this, so this is the intellectual humility thing kicking in. So there's a psychologist named Frank Kyle, who's also studied intellectual humility, and I remember. At a talk once somebody was saying this, like, but I just feel so bad when I'm wrong.

Tenelle Porter: I, I shouldn't have to feel good to learn that I'm wrong.

And Frank was like, it's great to learn that I'm wrong. Like I've learned something new. What a wonderful thing. I just discovered something new I've made like. This is learning. This is so exciting. And so maybe there are people out there who have reframed it in a way that it is like discovery. And maybe if we could all do that a little bit more.

Intellectual humility might become a little easier.

Chris Duffy: Framing also makes me think about how a lot of these skills that are uncomfortable or painful at first are, are in some ways muscles, right, like that you can strengthen them and they get better. I, I just think about for myself, one of the things that people ask the most frequently when they find out that I perform standup comedy is, oh my God, have you ever bombed?

Of course I've bombed some audiences would say that I've never stopped bombing. But what really has changed is like when you first perform. And you get up there and you think you're gonna say something funny and you say it and no one laughs. That first time is excruciating. It is so horrible. It's this real death of the ego.

But if you're gonna keep doing comedy over time, it gets easier because you've done it. So you know, okay, I survive. And even though it's uncomfortable and awkward, it's mortifying for a day or for a week, but it goes away. The feeling of like that shame after doing it. And now. I'm not gonna say it's like this every time, but a lot of times if I tell a joke and it does not get any reaction from the audience, that is actually really just helpful information for me.

Like, oh, something's not working about that. It's not information about me as a person. It's not like you are a terrible, disgusting, horrible human and you're horrible at your job. It's like, okay, maybe I worded that badly, or maybe I didn't give enough context. Or maybe I'm just wrong that this is a universal

Thing that people can relate to. Like there's, there's some information there that I can take away. I imagine without everyone being standup comedians, there's similar exposure therapy or work and muscles and practice that you can do to, to feel like accepting your limitations or your, um, intellectual limits isn't as painful as it is at first.

Tenelle Porter: I think that's absolutely right, and I believe pretty strongly that intellectual humility is really malleable. It is one of these things that we can develop through practice. I have met people who have really strong intuitions in the other direction. The idea that, well, people are, some people are kind of born this way and other people aren't, and there's just nothing.

We can do about it, but this is one of those places where I'm gonna stick to my conviction that training, this is really possible and worthwhile. And if we can't learn. Then we just end up being stuck where we currently are and it's really exciting to like push forward and progress and learn something new.

Chris Duffy: We're gonna take a quick break right now. This is a wonderful opportunity for everyone to learn something new about podcast ads.

And we are back. Today we're talking with Dr. Tenelle Porter about intellectual humility. So thinking about this, what are some things that people can do to  build intellectual humility in themselves or to practice it in their daily lives?

Tenelle Porter: Yes. Great question. Okay. What can they do? I'm like, so much of my research is like about what can other people do to help other people develop it, or what does it do when you have it, but, okay, here's one.

Here's one thing. You can try to build intellectual humility if you find yourself. In a conflict and you see things differently than somebody else, you just disagree. Take a step back. Just remove yourself from the situation, and then imagine looking back on this situation from 20 years in the future, or imagine that you are a fly on the wall watching this play out.

Get some distance from the situation and then try to re-approach it. So this idea of like when we get a little bit of perspective. It often just opens us up a little bit to intellectual humility, so that's one thing you can try. Another thing you can try to build intellectual humility is just remind yourself of the benefits of being this way.

There's a lot in our culture that says intellectual humility is . Not good. It makes you look weak. It's not gonna help you. But there's also a lot in our culture that says, no, this is, this is a good way to be. This is a really good way to connect with other people. This is a good way to learn something new.

This is an honest way to be because we are humans and no one is infallible. So remember the benefits. Three, if you're finding yourself in a place for your. You're really struggling to communicate, like see eye to eye with another person or even listen to them. You can just like take a moment. Again, remove yourself and just reflect on your values, like what are some values that are really important to you?

This is a technique that's used in brief interventions. It's also used in. Intensive psychotherapy values and action therapy and that kind of grounding in your values. And lots of people will say like, my connections with friends and family are really important to me. Just a way of just getting in touch with what's important.

It kind of anchors the self so that you're, you're feeling in the way more secure to go back into that interaction and be able to listen to what the other person has to say without feeling really threatened and needing to protect and defend yourself. Okay.

Tenelle Porter: The fourth one I'd say is to put yourself into a kind of growth mindset,

So this is this idea that growth and change are possible and good. You can grow in understanding the other person can also change and grow in understanding. So believing the other person can change is helpful. But this kind of like emphasis on growth is something that we've learned helps people embrace intellectual humility.

Chris Duffy: I imagine a lot of people who are parents if they're listening to this, would would say like, oh, well, intellectual humility. That's something I definitely would want my kid to have.

Tenelle Porter: I am not a parent and I, my heart goes out to all of you parents out there, and it's a wonderful job and it's really, really important.

And I have friends and I have. Siblings with kids and they do worry about this, which is interesting, even about the humility thing specifically. So how can you encourage this in kids? As a parent, I will always go back to the kind of practice what you preach. So find ways to model it. Say you're asked a question and and you're not sure, like.

Don't derogate the question or be like, how could anyone ever know? Or on the 15th, why question? Just like lose your mind and give up. It's like, well, I'm not sure. Like I'm trying to model intellectual humility. I'm not sure. Maybe we can try to look it up together. So modeling is important, celebrating intellectual humility.

It's really hard for a kid to be vulnerable in certain settings and just be like. I was wrong. I got that wrong. I don't understand. I don't know. Like showing that to another person can be tough. So when that happens, that's a good thing to celebrate. Like, wow, I'm so like proud of how brave you are to admit that that's a really good sign of character.

Like I'm really proud of you for doing that. So celebrating when your child. Has humility is really important.

Chris Duffy: I don't know if you've studied this, but I wonder if there's also a, a, a gender gap in intellectual humility. 'cause I certainly think that a lot of the ideas of what it means to be a man in society have to do with this like decisiveness and certainty and not backing down.

And I think that, you know, there's so many ways in which like these strict gender roles like trap men and don't allow them to, to grow or to be their full selves.

Tenelle Porter: That's super interesting. It's a great point. And what we see is that teenage boys are a lot more likely to endorse the idea that it's bad to show any kind of weakness.

So if we look at boys and girls and then on that kind of survey item, the boys are like, I don't, I don't wanna show weakness and admitting you don't know something. If it's a sign of weakness, they think it as a sign of weakness, like it's not a good thing to do. So there definitely are gender dynamics working here, but what we also see, and perhaps is this linked to some research showing that girls and young women feel this pressure to be sort of perfect, is that when it comes to say like.

Raising your hand to speak up in a class and say, I don't understand that, or I don't know what that is. When you are kind of showing that to the whole class and interrupting the class to take the class's time to do that, that's something that girls are much more hesitant about doing than boys are. We see that in lots of studies, so we find in those studies that when the teacher has modeled that humility, first girls become a lot more comfortable.

Voicing their own questions in that setting.

Tenelle Porter: And that gap between boys and girls and how comfortable they are voicing their question closes.

Chris Duffy: Yeah. It also makes me think that, you know, if you're non-binary or if you don't fit into the spectrum, I, I imagine that that actually requires a little bit more intellectual humility because you just have to create some of your own path there.

You have to be willing to imagine something that is outside of a yes or no, and I wonder if that would actually require more intellectual humility as well. But also then I can see the other side, right? Like, you also have to have this like, definitive sense of like, I, I know this to be true about myself, and even when everyone else is gonna tell me something that's, that's not right, I have to hold true to that.

So I could see both ways. I, I think all of these, right, there's, there's always these competing tensions maybe.

Tenelle Porter: It's very intellectually humble of you to see it both ways and this conversation is already taking effect. I like that. I think that you're right and I think some of these conversations around gender are asking us to question categories that are really old and that have been pretty rigid and that you know that we can

Asking us to take another look at these categories, and I think there's real value in doing that.

Chris Duffy: How would having more intellectual humility impact our society? Right? On this larger level? How would it change the way that we live in our world if people across the board really embrace this and tried to cultivate this?

Tenelle Porter: I think if people really embrace this, we would see, we would literally see more progress. I think we would learn more because we would begin to stop holding so tightly to what we think is true, so we might question and push the boundaries further, which would allow to allow us to progress. You know, right now we're going through a kind of trauma in the country as folks are divided.

That's hard to even have a conversation with somebody who disagrees with you politically or is on the other side of the … I'll, and I think if we embrace intellectual humility, we find it's easier to get along and love each other.

Chris Duffy: Tenelle, thank you so much for being on the show. It's such a pleasure talking to you.

Tenelle Porter: Thank you so much. I'm really glad to have been here.

Chris Duffy: That is it for this episode of How to Be a Better Human. Thank you so much for listening. If I got anything wrong, I apologize, and I will try to be intellectually humble about doing better in the future. Thank you so much to today's guest, Dr. Tenelle Porter. I am your host, Chris Duffy, and you can find more from me, including my weekly newsletter and other projects@chrisduffycomedy.com.

How to Be a Better Human is put together by a team of intellectual giants. On the TED side, we’ve got: Daniella Balarezo, Banban Cheng, Cloe Shasha Brooks, Valentina Bojanini, Lanie Lott, Antonia Le, and Joseph DeBrine. This episode was fact-checked by Julia Dickerson and Matheus Salles, who epitomize the spirit of accepting and correcting mistakes.

On the PRX side, they are humble royalty: Morgan Flannery, Noor Gill, Pedro Rafael Rosado, Patrick Grant, and Jocelyn Gonzales.

Thanks again to you for listening. Please share this episode with a friend or a family member, someone you know who epitomizes intellectual humility, or someone who desperately needs to learn more about intellectual humility.

Either way, share it with them. Thank you for helping us. To spread the word about this show, we will be back next week with even more how to be a better human. Until then, take care.