What makes some people believe in conspiracy theories and false news reports more than others? Is it their political or religious perspective? Is it a lack of formal education? Or is it more about their age, gender or socio-economic background? A recently published study suggests that more important than any of these factors is another characteristic: the extent to which someone has — or does not have — intellectual humility.
Intellectual humility can be thought of as a willingness to recognise our own cognitive limitations and biases, to admit when we’re wrong, and to be more interested in understanding the truth of an issue than in being right. Its spirit is captured nicely by the quote often attributed (probably wrongly) to John Maynard Keynes: “When the facts change, I change my mind — what do you do, sir?”
In their study, Marco Meyer and Mark Alfano — academics who specialise in social epistemology, a field at the intersection of philosophy and psychology — found those who possess this virtue are much better at differentiating between accurate news reports and false ones. They suggest that having intellectual humility was a better predictor of someone’s ability to resist fake news than any of the other factors they looked at.