People with strong political beliefs can still be intellectually humble, study finds

A new study published in The Journal of Positive Psychology suggests that people do not have to weaken their political beliefs in order to be open-minded. Researchers found that intellectual humility—the ability to recognize the limits of one’s own knowledge—was not meaningfully related to how strongly someone held their political beliefs. At the same time, the study revealed a small association between intellectual humility and a more liberal political orientation.

The study was motivated by growing interest in how intellectual humility can help people engage more constructively with those who hold opposing political views. Political hostility, especially in the United States, has reached alarming levels in recent years. People often express more hatred for members of the opposing political party than they feel love for members of their own. This deep emotional divide—known as affective polarization—has been linked to political violence, misinformation, and a breakdown in democratic dialogue. Researchers are increasingly looking for ways to reduce these tensions, and intellectual humility has emerged as a promising candidate.

Prior research shows that intellectually humble individuals are more likely to seek accurate political information, are less prone to dismiss others’ opinions, and tend to engage in more respectful political discussions. But there has been lingering uncertainty in the field: are people who show more intellectual humility simply less polarized to begin with? Are they just people with weaker political convictions or less ideological commitment?

“Much of our research focuses on how intellectual humility predicts resistance to political hostility, conflict, and bias,” explained study author Jonah Koetke, a graduate student at the University of Pittsburgh. “However, we must also consider whether intellectual humility itself is more common among those who are already less ideologically polarized. If so, this would be a concerning confound. The goal of this work was to examine whether (1) intellectual humility is associated with strength of political belief, and (2) intellectual humility is associated with certain political views.”

To explore this issue, the researchers conducted a large-scale analysis using data from nine different surveys, involving a total of 3,248 participants. These surveys had been collected over the course of two years and included people with diverse political beliefs, many of whom were recruited to ensure a balance of liberals and conservatives. The researchers used two well-established measures of intellectual humility. The first, used in eight of the samples (Sample A), measured general intellectual humility through self-report items like “I accept that my beliefs and attitudes may be wrong.” The ninth sample (Sample B) used a more detailed, multidimensional scale that included items about openness to revising one’s views, respect for others’ viewpoints, and avoidance of overconfidence.

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Participants also answered questions about their political beliefs. In Sample A, this included how strongly they identified with their political ideology. In Sample B, participants rated how certain they were that their political views were correct, and how much those views reflected their core moral values. Political orientation was measured in both samples by asking participants to rate themselves on economic and social issues, from very liberal to very conservative.

The main question was whether intellectual humility was linked to the strength of political belief. Across the data, the researchers found that the association was either very small or nonexistent. In the larger sample, intellectual humility had a very weak negative relationship with political belief strength, but the effect size was so small that it was likely only statistically significant because of the large number of participants. In the smaller sample that used more detailed measures, there was no significant relationship between intellectual humility and how strongly people held or moralized their political beliefs.

This finding suggests that intellectual humility is not the same as political detachment. People can feel strongly about their political positions while still being open to the possibility that they might be wrong. In other words, conviction and humility are not mutually exclusive. This supports the idea that intellectual humility is less about doubt or indecisiveness, and more about how people relate to their own beliefs—recognizing the possibility of error without automatically discarding their views.

“Across a fairly large sample, we found that intellectual humility was not reliably associated with strength of one’s political beliefs,” Koetke told PsyPost. “This is encouraging because it implies that even people who strongly identify with their political ideology can be intellectually humble. This has promising implications for reducing polarization, as it suggests that the benefits of intellectual humility for reducing political hostility might extend even to those who have more entrenched political views.”

The second key question was whether intellectual humility is connected to political orientation—that is, whether people who are more intellectually humble tend to be more liberal or more conservative. Here, the researchers found a small but consistent association: people with higher intellectual humility tended to report a more liberal political orientation. This was true in seven of the eight samples in Sample A, and while the association was smaller and not statistically significant in Sample B, it pointed in the same direction.

“We found that intellectual humility was associated with holding a more liberal political orientation,” Koetke said. “This indicates that we need to more carefully consider the moderating role of political orientation in our research.”

One possibility is that liberal ideology, which tends to emphasize openness to new experiences and tolerance for ambiguity, may attract or encourage traits like intellectual humility. Another possibility is that recent political leaders and cultural norms have shaped different expectations around intellectual openness within liberal and conservative circles. For example, political figures who model humility or self-reflection may reinforce those traits among their followers, while those who reject error or claim infallibility may discourage them.

But the researchers caution against drawing strong conclusions about ideological differences between groups. While the association between intellectual humility and liberalism was consistent, it was relatively small.

“We were surprised that intellectual humility was associated with more liberal political orientation, as this had not been found reliably in prior work,” Koetke explained. “However, it is important to remember that this association was relatively small in magnitude.

As with all research, there are also some limitations. “There are two caveats to this work that are important to consider,” Koetke said. “First, we do not yet understand the underlying reasons for the association between liberal political orientation and intellectual humility. Is it that people who are more liberal develop more intellectual humility over time, or that people who are more intellectually humble become more liberal over time? Alternatively, there could be a third variable causing the association between intellectual humility and liberal views. Second, because our samples for this study were all collected online, the generalizability of these findings may be limited.”

The study, “Is intellectual humility polarized too? A systematic examination of intellectual humility, political orientation, and strength of political belief,” was authored by Jonah Koetke and Karina Schumann.