Intellectually humble people show heightened empathic accuracy and emotional resilience

New research published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin suggests that people who recognize the fallibility of their beliefs may also be more accurate at interpreting others’ feelings. Across three studies, researchers found that intellectual humility was positively associated with empathic accuracy, particularly toward members of a perceived outgroup. The findings also suggest that intellectual humility can increase empathic concern without amplifying personal distress—a pattern the researchers call “empathic resilience.”

The study was motivated by growing interest in how intellectual humility—the ability to acknowledge that one’s beliefs may be wrong—shapes social behavior. While past research has shown that humility can reduce prejudice, increase forgiveness, and improve tolerance for different perspectives, less is known about how it influences interpersonal dynamics in emotionally charged or divisive contexts.

“Intellectual humility—the understanding that we don’t know everything and that our knowledge is limited—is an important and rare virtue,” said study author Michal Lehmann, a postdoctoral research associate at Carnegie Mellon University.

“In my research, I am interested in how relationships shape and are shaped by intellectual humility. In this project, I partnered with Prof. Anat Perry from the Hebrew University, her students Shir Genzer and Nur Kassem, and Prof. Daryl R. Van Tongeren from Hope College to uncover how and whether intellectual humility affects true understanding of other people’s emotions.”

“We tested this question in a particularly interesting context: how Jewish Israelis understand other Jewish Israelis and Palestinian Israelis.”

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For their research, Lehmann and her colleagues conducted three pre-registered studies involving a total of 533 participants, all Jewish Israeli adults. The studies focused on cognitive empathy, or the ability to accurately identify what others are feeling, and emotional empathy, which includes both empathic concern and personal distress.

To assess these aspects of empathy, participants viewed short video clips of individuals recounting emotional personal experiences—some from the Jewish majority, others from the Palestinian minority. The researchers then compared participants’ judgments of the speakers’ emotions with the speakers’ own self-reported emotional states.

In the first study, 212 participants either visited a lab or participated via Zoom due to COVID-19 restrictions. Each participant watched eight videos—four featuring Jewish Israeli women and four featuring Palestinian Israeli women. While watching the videos, participants rated the speakers’ emotions in real time using a sliding scale. They also completed additional measures assessing their own emotional reactions, as well as questionnaires measuring trait-level intellectual humility.

The findings from this first study suggested that intellectual humility predicted greater empathic accuracy, especially when participants viewed videos of Palestinian Israeli speakers—an outgroup in the local sociopolitical context. Participants higher in intellectual humility were more accurate in recognizing the emotions of outgroup members compared to those lower in humility. This association was weaker or even reversed when evaluating members of their own group.

“We found that the intellectual humility of Jewish Israelis predicts understanding of others’ emotions—especially those of people from the outgroup (Palestinian Israelis),” Lehmann told PsyPost. “This made a lot of sense to me, as it aligned with the idea that intellectual humility plays a greater role when a relationship is different or more challenging.”

“What surprised me was that in subsequent studies, we did not find a difference in understanding between Jewish Israelis and Palestinians. This doesn’t mean the difference isn’t there, but rather that we need to collect more data to further investigate these questions.”

Participants with higher intellectual humility also reported greater empathic concern—such as feeling compassion or sympathy—and less personal distress, such as feeling overwhelmed or upset, when listening to emotional stories. This combination of high concern and low distress is what the researchers referred to as “empathic resilience.” It reflects the capacity to stay emotionally engaged without becoming emotionally overwhelmed.

The second study replicated these findings with a new group of 112 participants. This time, the researchers included a measure of motivation for empathy, asking participants to choose between engaging with their own feelings or trying to imagine how someone else might feel across a series of trials. As in the first study, intellectual humility was associated with greater empathic accuracy using one of the two empathy metrics. Again, those higher in humility showed a wider gap between empathic concern and personal distress.

However, the researchers did not find evidence that motivation for empathy explained the link between intellectual humility and empathic accuracy. This suggests that humility might influence empathy through other mechanisms, such as how individuals process emotional information or regulate their own emotional responses.

To test whether intellectual humility could be experimentally increased, the researchers conducted a third study using a between-subjects design with 209 participants. One group was assigned to read materials and answer questions designed to foster intellectual humility, while the other group was exposed to content emphasizing intellectual certainty. The manipulation increased state-level intellectual humility in the target group, confirming that it was effective.

Although the manipulation did not directly increase empathic accuracy, it did lead to an indirect effect: participants in the humility condition scored higher on the intellectual humility scale, which in turn predicted better empathic accuracy.

This suggests that boosting intellectual humility can enhance emotional understanding, even if the effect is indirect. The third study also showed that participants higher in humility reported greater empathic concern than personal distress, once again demonstrating the pattern of empathic resilience.

To strengthen their conclusions, the researchers conducted a mini meta-analysis combining data from all three studies. They found that, across measures and samples, intellectual humility was positively associated with empathic accuracy, though the effect was small. Another mini meta-analysis confirmed that humility consistently predicted empathic resilience across studies.

“Intellectual humility has an important value, especially when the situation and a relationship are challenging,” Lehmann said. “In this case, when citizens of the same country come from diverse and complicated backgrounds, like Jewish and Palestinian Israelis.”

The study—like all research—includes some caveats. All participants were unfamiliar with the people in the videos, so it remains unclear whether the findings would extend to close personal relationships. The samples were also composed of Jewish Israeli participants viewing videos from a specific cultural context, which may limit generalizability to other populations or conflicts.

“It is important to note that we tested our questions in a specific context—relationships between Jewish and Palestinian Israelis, from the perspective of Jewish participants,” Lehmann explained. “It would be both interesting and important to explore whether these findings apply in other contexts.”

“First, do similar patterns emerge among Palestinian Israelis when they encounter Israeli Jews? And beyond that, in other societies—such as between Black and white people in the U.S., neurodivergent and neurotypical individuals, or straight and gay people?”

“I am currently working on several projects related to intellectual humility,” Lehmann added. “In one line of research with Prof. Anat Perry, I am exploring interventions to increase intellectual humility, particularly through interpersonal listening. In another, with Prof. Laurie Weingart from Carnegie Mellon University, I am examining the role of intellectual humility in fostering team effectiveness across various contexts, including negotiations, hackathons, and multi-disciplinary teams.”

The study, “Intellectual Humility Predicts Empathic Accuracy and Empathic Resilience,” was authored by Michal Lehmann, Shir Genzer, Nur Kassem, Daryl R. Van Tongeren, and Anat Perry.