People with a higher level of intellectual humility are less likely to take fake news headlines at face value, according to new research published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. The new study provides evidence of a causal link between intellectual humility and the desire to investigate political misinformation.
Intellectual humility refers to the ability to recognize the limits of one’s knowledge and to accept the possibility of being wrong. People with a high level of intellectually humility tend to be less hostile towards their sociopolitical rivals and more motivated to learn new information. The authors of the new study were interested in examining whether the trait could help battle misinformation.
“We were interested in this topic for two reasons: First, political misinformation is an issue that contributes to political division. Therefore, it is important to better understand what predicts people choosing to investigate the information they come across. Second, it replicates and provides further clarification to the findings we reported in a paper last year,” said study author Jonah Koetke, a graduate student at the University of Pittsburgh.
Koetke and his colleagues conducted a series of three studies to investigate the relationship between intellectual humility and the willingness to investigate politically-charged news headlines.
In their first study, the researchers randomly assigned 289 participants to view either a real or fake headline related to the January 6 Capitol riot. Furthermore, the participants were randomly assigned to either investigate the headline or to continue without investigating.
Koetke and his colleagues found that those who were instructed to investigate tended to report that the real headline was significantly more accurate and the fake headline was significantly less accurate, compared to those in the control condition. This was true even after controlling for the participants’ attitudes regarding Donald Trump and the January 6 Capitol riot.
“We found that investigating misinformation (fact checking, looking at alternative views, etc.) seems to be an effective, and not time consuming, way to increase our accuracy when looking at online articles,” Koetke told PsyPost.
For their second study, the researchers randomly assigned 285 participants to read a fake headline that was either concordant or discordant with their ideology. In other words, some participants read a fake headline that was appealing to their political worldview while others read a fake headline that clashed with their political worldview. They were then asked about their likelihood of engaging in investigative behaviors, such as checking the source of the headline or reading the full article.
Participants who scored higher on a measure of intellectual humility reported a higher likelihood of engaging in investigative behaviors. This was true for both ideologically concordant and discordant headlines.
For their third study, Koetke and his colleagues sought to test the causal relationship between intellectual humility and investigative behaviors by conducting a randomized experiment with 315 participants.
In the experimental condition, participants answered three seemingly obvious science-related questions that are often answered incorrectly. (For example, one question was “What mountain peak is farthest from the center of the Earth?” Most people say Mount Everest. But the correct answer is Chimborazo.) They then wrote about why it is okay to recognize the limits of one’s knowledge.
In the control condition, participants answered three multiple-choice questions about office technology and then wrote about why it is okay to use office technology to make work more efficient.
The participants then completed an assessment of intellectual humility before reading a fake headline and reporting their likelihood of engaging in investigative behaviors. The researchers found that participants in the experimental condition tended to score higher on the measure of intellectual humility, which in turn positively predicted investigative behaviors.
“Intellectual humility, or the awareness that our knowledge may be wrong, may play an important role in combating political misinformation. It is therefore important to be humble in our own knowledge,” Koetke told PsyPost.
The researchers controlled for a number of variables — such as education, open-mindedness, and political orientation — that could potentially influence the relationship between intellectual humility and the willingness to investigate news headlines. But as with any study, the research includes some limitations.
“One major caveat is that these studies were all run in a controlled setting,” Koetke said. “Therefore, future research should seek to replicate these findings out in the real world.”
The study, “Fallibility Salience Increases Intellectual Humility: Implications for People’s Willingness to Investigate Political Misinformation“, was authored by Jonah Koetke, Karina Schumann, Tenelle Porter, and Ilse Smilo-Morgan.