Intellectual humility is linked to less political and religious polarization across the board

A new study published in The Journal of Positive Psychology indicates that people who score higher in intellectual humility tend to show less political and religious polarization — regardless of whether they are Republican, Democrat, Christian, or atheist. This link held across different measures, including both self-reported attitudes and behavioral indicators of hostility toward ideological outgroups, and often remained significant even after accounting for the strength of a person’s beliefs.

Intellectual humility refers to the recognition that one’s knowledge and understanding are limited. It involves a willingness to revise one’s views when presented with new evidence, the ability to separate personal identity from beliefs, and a respect for the perspectives of others. While it does not require abandoning one’s convictions, it emphasizes openness, curiosity, and a readiness to acknowledge that one could be wrong. Past research has tied intellectual humility to less ideological rigidity, more tolerance for opposing views, and a greater willingness to engage constructively with people who hold different beliefs.

In the United States, political and religious divisions are deeply intertwined, with each often reinforcing the other. Political polarization — particularly the “affective” kind, which combines disagreement with active dislike of the other side — has reached historically high levels. Religious polarization, though less studied, is also significant, contributing to mistrust and prejudice.

Because intellectual humility aligns closely with interventions shown to reduce polarization — such as promoting accurate perceptions of the outgroup and encouraging respectful intergroup contact — the researchers wanted to know whether its effects would be consistent across both political and religious divides. They also sought to determine whether these patterns held regardless of the specific group identities involved.

“Previous studies found that intellectual humility was related to less political and religious polarization, but these two forms of polarization were assessed independently in relation to intellectual humility,” said study author Shauna Bowes, an incoming assistant professor of psychology at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.

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“Political and religious polarization are often deeply intertwined. Moreover, if intellectual humility is powerful for understanding less polarization, then it should be related to less polarization across belief domains and identities. Thus, I simultaneously examined religious and political polarization in relation to intellectual humility.”

The researchers recruited participants through an online panel, first screening 1,000 people to identify those who identified as either Christian or atheist and as either Republican or Democrat. This yielded a final sample of 473 adults, predominantly White and evenly split between men and women, with 44% identifying as Republican and 56% as Democrat. Most participants were Christian (76%), with the remainder identifying as atheist.

Participants completed several measures. Intellectual humility was assessed using the Comprehensive Intellectual Humility Scale, which captures four dimensions: independence of intellect and ego, openness to revising one’s viewpoint, respect for others’ viewpoints, and lack of intellectual overconfidence.

Polarization was measured in two ways. First, participants rated their attitudes toward their political and religious outgroups on items related to social contact, favorability, emotional warmth, and prejudice. Second, in a behavioral task, participants were asked to assign tangram puzzles of varying difficulty to an outgroup member, with the opportunity to make the task either easier or harder for the other person, and reported their motives for doing so.

The study also included measures of variables that often predict polarization, such as intolerance of uncertainty, distress intolerance, moralization of political beliefs, and the degree to which participants’ political and religious beliefs were central to their identity. Belief strength — how strongly participants held and felt certain about their political or religious views — was included as a control variable in some analyses.

Across the board, higher intellectual humility was linked to lower levels of political and religious polarization. This was true for both self-reported attitudes and the behavioral measure of hostility toward outgroups. The relationships tended to be consistent across different dimensions of intellectual humility, although openness to revising one’s viewpoint was generally the weakest predictor, especially in the behavioral task.

“It was interesting to see that the results did not vary across methods of assessment,” Bowes told PsyPost. “That is, we used self-report and experimental measures of polarization. Intellectual humility was related to less polarization for the self-report measures and the experimental measures of polarization. These findings provide additional support for the robustness of the relationship, as it is not solely driven by shared method variance (i.e., that everything is self-reported).”

When the researchers compared political and religious domains directly, they found almost no differences in how strongly intellectual humility related to polarization. In other words, the quality of being intellectually humble seemed to work similarly in both contexts.

The relationships also held across group identities. Republicans and Democrats showed similar patterns, as did Christians and atheists. Notably, this symmetry between Christians and atheists is striking given the lack of middle ground between their worldviews, suggesting that intellectual humility may reduce animosity even across deeply opposed existential positions.

Most of these effects remained significant even after controlling for belief strength. This suggests that the link between intellectual humility and reduced polarization is not simply a byproduct of holding weaker convictions. On average, intellectual humility explained an additional 3% to 5% of the variance in polarization beyond what could be accounted for by belief strength alone.

However, the study found little evidence that intellectual humility buffered against other traits and tendencies known to increase polarization, such as intolerance of uncertainty or distress intolerance. The few protective effects observed were linked to the ability to separate one’s ego from one’s beliefs, which appeared to weaken the connection between strong identity-based beliefs and polarization.

“Across belief domains and identities, intellectual humility is related to less polarization,” Bowes explained. “As such, intellectual humility may help people be less prone to polarization across the board. That said, intellectual humility likely contributes to less polarization in concert with other processes, such as a low need for closure, as intellectual humility did not invariably statistically protect against variables that predict more polarization.”

As with all research, there are some limitations to consider. The study focused only on two political identities (Republican and Democrat) and two religious identities (Christian and atheist), leaving out many other important identity groups. Political and religious identities also overlapped considerably in the sample — for example, most Republicans identified as Christian — which limited the ability to explore combinations such as Republican atheists or Democratic Christians in depth.

“We can only draw conclusions about intellectual humility and polarization in the context of (1) Republicans and Democrats and (2) Christians and atheists,” Bowes noted. “Additional research is needed to clarify the generalizability of our results when examining other political, religious, and irreligious identities.”

The researchers suggest that future work should investigate intellectual humility in other political and religious groups, examine more diverse irreligious identities, and explore how interventions might foster intellectual humility over time. They also highlight the need to determine whether increasing intellectual humility can causally reduce polarization, rather than simply being associated with it.

“I would be eager to conduct more causal and applied research,” Bowes said. “Regarding causal research, it will be important to establish that intellectual humility precedes less polarization and causes less polarization. Regarding applied research, which is linked with causal research, I would be excited to look at whether increasing or cultivating intellectual humility reduces polarization.”

The study, “How intellectual humility relates to political and religious polarization,” was authored by Shauna M. Bowes and Arber Tasimi.