How to Be a Better Human - The right way to know you might be wrong (w/ Tenelle Porter)
Episode Date: March 10, 2025Tenelle Porter’s job is to study humility. Specifically, intellectual humility, the idea that we might be wrong or mistaken about some of our beliefs. Tenelle talks with Chris about why she thinks i...ntellectual humility is so important, how to cultivate it, and why it’s the missing piece in so many conversations these days. Whether it’s in politics, academia or social media, Tenelle argues discovering you are wrong doesn’t have to be a painful realization, rather it can lead to positive discovery. For the full text transcript, visit go.ted.com/BHTranscripts Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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You're listening to How to Be a Better Human.
I am your host, Chris Duffy.
One thing about me is that no one has ever accused me
of having a small head.
I have a big head both literally, in that I have trouble finding hats that fit, and
figuratively, in that I think I should stand on stage and have audiences of strangers listen
to me talk.
And I host a podcast called How to be a Better Human.
Humility, not really my strong suit.
Today's guest, Tenille Porter, is a professor and a researcher who studies humility.
She's an important person for me to talk to.
But Tenille studies a very specific kind of humility, intellectual humility, and that's
actually a term that I had never heard of before meeting her, and now it's one that
I cannot stop thinking about.
Intellectual humility seems to me like it is the key piece that is missing from so many conversations in the world today.
It really feels like this is something that more people need to know about.
And here's how Tanil defines intellectual humility.
Intellectual humility means understanding what you don't know and recognizing that you might be wrong. Of course, all of us think that
we're right and sometimes we are right, but that feeling of being right is a subjective
experience and it doesn't always match reality. So intellectual humility is really about understanding
that our knowledge is partial, that nobody knows everything there is to know, and therefore we sometimes get things wrong.
If there's one thing that I'm a pro at, it is getting things wrong. Now I think we
did get something right when we booked Tenille on the show today and I'm so
excited that we're gonna get to talk to her about why knowing that you get things
wrong is one of the most important things that you can get right. Hi, I'm Dr. Tineal Porter and I am an assistant professor of psychology at Rowan University.
So Tineal, let's start with the fact that you study intellectual humility. That is something
that I think many people are probably not familiar with, but I wonder if you have like
a specific example that can illustrate this for people. Yeah, I can think of one recently. So I was taking an international flight. So I was flying
to England on a red eye. I got settled into my seat. I was in a window seat. And we were just
about done with boarding. The last few people were coming on, and a woman came on the plane and kind of stood
outside my row and said, you're in my seat.
And I said, no, I'm not.
I'm in 34A.
And then the woman in the middle seat said, well, I'm in 33B.
And then it was just very clear that, oh, I'm in the wrong seat. I was totally
wrong. I'm so sorry. Let me get up and everybody has to get up. And you may not have had that
experience of something so simple of getting into the wrong seat on a plane, but every
single person has had that experience of being totally wrong about something, because
we're humans, and that's part of what it is to be human.
It also seems to me like this is a field of study that I would have imagined was kind
of intellectually interesting in the past, and now feels like directly relevant to our
everyday lives and survival of our species and societies.
So holding space for the possibility that we might be wrong is not a new idea.
It's been with us for a really long time. Scientists have written about it for thousands of years.
Philosophers have written about it as something that we ought to be doing to
have a good life. I think what's new now is that we're trying or starting to
study it scientifically, but it of course has bearing in so many different contexts
and domains. How do you study this scientifically? We try to measure
intellectual humility or we try to do experiments that will kind of
change how intellectually humble people are or feel comfortable being in a certain context.
So people take a questionnaire.
Right now I'm working on a different kind of measure where we're actually going to take
high school students and ask them what they think about cell phone bans.
So should they be allowed to have
their cell phones in classes?
Lots of high school students have really strong opinions
on this issue, as you might imagine.
And instead of asking them to say,
how humble do you think you are about this issue,
we're gonna ask them to actually engage with perspectives
that don't agree with them or with theirs. So how many reasons from a student who disagrees with you on this would
you want to read? And we'll look at their behavior on this computer task and use that to measure
how intellectually humble they are. Are there ages or phases where we are more intellectually humble or is it kind of one
of those things where we have this moment at the beginning of our lives and then afterwards
we just have to really work hard to become humble again?
It's interesting.
We're trying to learn about that still.
So there's stuff that we don't know about that yet.
But sometimes, you know, if you ask like a four-year-old, how much do you know about
trucks or how much do you know about this really like why frogs look the way they do a four-year-old is gonna say
I know everything about that. I know
everything but as kids and just like you're saying and I know you're a teacher as kids get into school
They start to get better at calibrating how much they know and how much they don't know and they become more accurate and that accuracy is sort of like a nice trajectory that keeps getting higher
and higher as they go through school.
So they're getting better at it.
And there's this idea too that with teenagers that like, oh, this must be a period when
the humility like hits the floor.
Like I don't even know if they're capable of being
humble. That's not really what we see, actually. If you look at all the data, teenagers aren't
any more narcissistic than anybody else. They're actually a little bit better than super young
kids at knowing what they know and what they don't know. And then thinking about the whole lifespan,
yeah, something that I've seen in my data
is that sometimes as people get older,
they're more intellectually humble.
It's almost like with experience,
you really come to just appreciate this fact
of being a human being, which is that, you know,
to be human is to err. We're all fallible.
What is the opposite of intellectual humility? Is there a term for that?
The opposite of intellectual humility is intellectual rigidity. That's like extreme
certainty. But I think that what you're saying here also makes me think that it sort of makes me think about the the interaction between confidence and humility. It's like this idea that can you
be confident and intellectually humble at the same time? And I think that the
answer is yes and I think that for a lot of people you even have to have a
certain amount of confidence to be able to show intellectual humility.
It's like I'm so confident that I'm willing to be vulnerable in this way, that I am wrong,
or I don't understand that, or something. I don't know what that is. Tell me more about that.
Yeah, it makes me think too, you know, speaking to you right now, Taneeel, you are a professor
who is able to explain your work
in a way that I think anyone would really be able
to understand.
And I think that I've talked to a lot of scientists
and professors, weirdly I've had a career
where I've interviewed a lot of scientists and professors.
And I always think that that's really like a mark
of confidence, right?
Of confidence in your work and in your mastery
of the field, because it's really easy in academia
to hide behind jargon,
hide behind complex ways of saying simple things
and making it so like, well, you couldn't possibly understand
because I've done all this research
and I've done so many years of schooling
to say something that someone else could understand
if you said it more simply.
But sometimes people hide behind that.
And I think that is like a lack of confidence in themselves
and in their research. Yeah, well, that's a great compliment. That's the hide behind that. And I think that is like a lack of confidence in themselves and in their research.
Yeah, well, that's a great compliment. That's the best compliment that I've received.
I also think even putting the confidence or competence aside, it's so much more pleasant
to be with someone who can just say, I actually don't know, rather than saying like, you know,
giving a five minute monologue to obscure the fact that they don't know is never a fun
conversation.
Agreed. And I think something we're seeing with intellectual humility is that it's one
of these things that does really help relationships. I was listening to something the other day,
and it was about this test that you can ask on a first date. It's a test via a question.
You can ask someone, do you believe in ghosts? And the whole program I was listening to
is about how the answer to this question
will tell you a lot about the person.
So if they answer like, no, absolutely not,
I do not believe in ghosts and there's no information
that you could ever provide to me to show me
that ghosts are real.
They're like really rigid, you're learning something
that like this is gonna be like a kind of black
and white thinking person.
But if they're like,
I don't actually believe in ghosts right now,
but if like potentially maybe you could show me something
to convince me that ghosts are real,
I would change my belief.
Like this is a marker of intellectual humility.
When you think about intellectual humility
in that way, which is that you can be really rigid on one side
or really rigid on the other, but then somewhere
in the middle is this more flexible, intellectually humble
state, for me at least a very natural comparison that that
brings up is political beliefs or this spectrum of like,
what must be true.
And it feels to me like we are in a cultural moment
where there's very little cultural capital
in having flexibility.
And there's quite a lot of rewards
and cultural pressure to be rigid in your beliefs.
Yeah, I think that I do feel that.
I think that I especially feel that in online settings, social media
interactions, or I think that when it comes to interacting face to face, that
we're not as sort of dogmatic and rigid as we appear online.
as sort of dogmatic and rigid as we appear online. And what this makes me think is to what extent
we need big cultural shifts or big contexts
that can support intellectual humility
for it to really thrive.
I think that changing some of those environments
would be really impactful.
So like, what could a regular person do
to create more environments for intellectual humility
to thrive, both in themselves and also
in the interactions they have?
This is what I try to do.
I try to model intellectual humility as a teacher.
It really sets its own for students,
and it really licenses them to be
able to express that uncertainty or just take a risk to admit, I don't know
what that means. When I have said, you know, I know a lot about this topic, but I don't
know everything there is to know, or you actually know this thing that I don't know, so you
can help me understand that. I think that especially when we're in those positions,
I don't know, of power or influence like a teacher in a classroom, that can be really
powerful in setting the tone for that whole context.
We're going to take a quick break, and then we will be right back.
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And we are back.
Going back to teenagers, because you brought up teenagers before, I know you did a really
important study on intellectual humility with teens.
I feel like that same thing is a real skill that many people are learning in teenage years,
which is that there are different paths, things that aren't necessarily all black and white, and that you're figuring out
what your story is versus what other people's story are,
and whether you want to be part of the group
or want to be separate from the group.
That's like a big piece of at least my experience
with teenage years, and it felt like people around me.
Can you talk to us both what you did
with the study on teenagers,
and then also why you picked that particular age.
I'll start with the second one.
I picked that particular age
because I care about teenagers.
I worked with teenagers when I was in college
as a youth mentor and it's just the stage of life
that I think is really challenging and really rich.
So much is happening that it fascinated me. I also think it
was just a really important time in my own life. Like some of the most formative just like core
values and beliefs that I have I think were forged in adolescence and young adulthood.
So there's this idea out there that maybe at this time of life when you need to be separating
from your parents and like making it like kind of breaking
out on your own and you have this really strong urge
to break out on your own, then maybe what you need
is like a really extreme like confidence
and kind of like a stride and see to help you make that difficult transition.
Like this is the way it is like, this is gonna help me break out. That's one story that we tell
ourselves about teenagerhood. Another story that's possible is like, well, maybe it helps teenagers
be a little bit more flexible and open and intellectually humble about what they believe.
It helps teenagers be a little bit more flexible and open and intellectually humble about what they believe.
Either one of those could be true.
So I was curious, what would intellectual humility in a teenager actually do to them?
Like would it make their lives worse or would it make their lives better or somewhere in
between?
And we looked at it in school.
Graduating from high school is one of these really important milestones that looks like
from the data to set you up to be on a path to have a longer life and a healthier life.
So succeeding in school is pretty important for kids at this age.
So we wanted to know what intellectual humility related at all to how successful they were in school. And we found intellectually humbler
teenagers were doing better in school. They were learning more and they
were more kind of persistent. So if they got negative feedback or a bad test grade
they were like, okay I'm not giving up. Like I'm gonna redouble and figure out
like change code whatever, figure out
what's going on and try harder next time. They were more receptive to feedback. So say they get some
negative feedback on an essay or something, they're like, that could be a good point. And they're more
likely to kind of incorporate that feedback in a revision going forward, and all this culminates in earning higher grades, which is a marker of learning.
So in a word, the intellectually humbler teenagers were learning more, seemed to help them in
school.
So that's like one study.
I'm not sure if there's other stuff.
No, that's great.
That's really helpful.
Okay.
Are there any findings that you found about intellectual humility that have really surprised
you because they've been counterintuitive maybe?
One thing is that that's kind of surprising is that so we could think about intellectual
humility as something that's happening in your head and something that you can also
like show to the world.
So I can be aware that I don't know something, but am I going to admit that to you?
Like something that is surprising to me is that we see sometimes if you're really,
really like turned way up in terms of how aware you are of the stuff that you don't know,
that can actually make you a lot less willing to to show that to other people.
less willing to show that to other people. They actually may make you a lot more nervous
about expressing what you don't know.
So it's getting into this question
of what is intellectual humility
and what's the opposite of it.
At one end of the extreme,
the opposite is something like rigidity, too much certainty.
But there's another extreme we could talk about, which
is like too much obsessing over what you don't know and getting kind of stuck in mire down
with all of the limitations. And that's also not a good place. That's not really virtuous. It's not really helpful. It's just like an overactive
attention to limitations.
And I imagine it stops you from, it really can prevent you from taking any sort of action
because you're like, well, I don't, I know that I don't know everything and maybe I don't
know enough. So I shouldn't actually do this thing. I should stop and get more feedback
and do more research and you know, you never you never get you you'll never know it all so
maybe you just never do anything exactly in my family we like to call this analysis paralysis
when it comes to intellectual humility at any age what we want is the balance between something that
is super rigid and something that is like super uncertain.
We're trying to find something that's well calibrated.
If you go to a conference, like when you go to like an academic conference on intellectual
humility, is it just everyone presenting and being like, well, I'm not sure about this,
but I might be wrong.
But here's an idea that I have.
Is it just people like everyone's hedging their bets constantly and not actually saying
a definitive statement because they're not positive that their research is actually totally
sound?
It's interesting that you should say that because I have had the experience of presenting
on intellectual humility to people who don't study it.
And I do think it has an effect on the audience such they become nicer.
Their questions are kinder.
They're a little bit like, it puts them in this frame of mind.
That's like, remember, you don't know everything.
I love that.
And you might be wrong.
So I really have experienced that.
I do think it has an effect.
You have a wonderful podcast voice.
You also have a way of speaking that I'm wondering is
if it's a chicken or an egg thing,
where it feels very
intellectually humble in that you like are thoughtful and you consider your words. You're
not just like rapid fire spraying words out there like I am. And I wonder if that is, do you feel
that you've started to think and speak differently as you learned more about intellectual humility,
or do you think that you always were kind of a thoughtful choosing your words speaker,
and then that is maybe partly why you were drawn to this
in the first place?
I think it's both.
I think it's both and I think I was drawn to it.
I've always been kind of thoughtful, kind of careful,
but it's way more, like way more since studying this.
I will say something and then I'm like,
do I really believe that? Is that really true?
Huh, I'm not sure, you know,
maybe I could see it from this other point of view.
Are there ways to encourage intellectual humility
in others without saying outright,
you should have more intellectual humility?
You have got to practice what you preach.
So intellectual for me first and then intellectual humility for these.
So if you really want your brother who disagrees with you about politics to show intellectual
humility to you, try showing it to him first and see what happens.
It's not a guarantee, but it's going to work a lot better than yelling at him to be more humble. Yeah. I would have really loved it if on the plane when I was
in the wrong seat, I would have been proven right. It was very painful to be that person
who had to stand up and make everyone stand up and walk the road behind. I think naturally it feels better,
but as I'm saying this,
so this is the intellectual humility thing kicking in.
So there's a psychologist named Frank Kyle,
who's also studied intellectual humility.
And I remember at a talk once somebody was saying this,
like, but I just feel so bad when I'm wrong.
I shouldn't have to feel good to
learn that I'm wrong. Frank was like, it's great to learn that I'm wrong. I've learned
something new. What a wonderful thing. I just discovered something new. This is learning.
This is so exciting. Maybe there are people out there who have reframed it in a way that it is like
Discovery and maybe if we could all do that a little bit more
Intellectual humility might become a little easier
Framing also makes me think about how a lot of these skills that are uncomfortable or painful at first are in some ways muscles Right like that you can strengthen them and they get better
I just think about for myself
one of the things that people ask the most frequently when they find out that I perform stand-up comedy is, oh my God, have you
ever bombed? Of course I've bombed. Some audiences would say that I've never stopped bombing. But
what really has changed is like when you first perform and you get up there and you think you're
going to say something funny and you say it and no one laughs, That first time is excruciating. It is so horrible. It's
this real death of the ego. But if you're going to keep doing comedy over time, it gets easier
because you've done it. So you know, okay, I survive. And even though it's uncomfortable
and awkward, it's mortifying for a day or for a week, but it goes away. The feeling of like that
shame after doing it. And now I'm not not gonna say it's like this every time,
but a lot of times if I tell a joke
and it does not get any reaction from the audience,
that is actually really just helpful information for me.
Oh, something's not working about that.
It's not information about me as a person.
It's not like you're a terrible, disgusting,
horrible human and you're horrible at your job. It's like like you're a terrible, disgusting, horrible human and you're horrible
at your job. It's like, okay, maybe I worded that badly or maybe I didn't give enough context
or maybe I'm just wrong that this is a universal thing that people can relate to. Like there's
some information there that I can take away. I imagine without everyone being standup comedians,
there's similar exposure therapy or work and muscles and practice that you can do to
feel like accepting your limitations or your intellectual limits isn't as painful as it is at
first. I think that's absolutely right and I believe pretty strongly that intellectual humility
is really malleable. It is one of these things that we can develop through practice.
I have met people who have really strong intuitions in the other direction. The idea that, well,
some people are kind of born this way and other people aren't and there's just nothing
we can do about it. But this is one of those places where I'm going to stick to my conviction that
training this is really possible and worthwhile. And if we can't learn, then we just end up being
stuck where we currently are. And it's really exciting to like push forward and progress
and learn something new. We're going to take a quick break right now.
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Today we're talking with Dr. Tenille Porter about intellectual humility.
So thinking about this, what are some things that people can do to build intellectual humility
in themselves or to practice it in their daily lives?
Yes.
Great question.
Okay.
What can they do?
I'm like, so much of my research is like about what can other people do to help other
people develop it? Or what does it do when you have it? But okay,
here's one. Here's one thing you can try to build intellectual
humility. If you find yourself in a conflict, and you see
things differently than somebody else, you just disagree. Take a
step back, just remove yourself from the situation, and then imagine looking back on the situation
from 20 years in the future.
Or imagine that you are a fly on the wall watching this play out.
Get some distance from the situation
and then try to re-approach it.
So this idea of like, when we get a little bit of perspective,
it often just opens us up a little bit
to intellectual humility.
So that's one thing you can try.
Another thing you can try to build intellectual humility
is just remind yourself of the benefits of being this way.
There's a lot in our culture that says
intellectual humility is not good. It
makes you look weak. It's not going to help you. But there's also a lot in our culture
that says, no, this is a good way to be. This is a really good way to connect with other
people. This is a good way to learn something new. This is an honest way to be because we
are humans and no one is invaluableallible. So remember the benefits.
Three, if you're finding yourself in a place where you're really struggling to communicate,
like see eye to eye with another person or even listen to them, you can just like take a moment
again, remove yourself and just reflect on your values. Like what are some values that are really
important to you? This is a technique that's used in brief interventions.
It's also used in intensive psychotherapy values and action therapy and that kind of
grounding in your values.
And lots of people will say, like, my connections with friends and family are really important
to me.
Just a way of just getting in touch with what's important, it kind of anchors the self so that you're feeling,
in a way, more secure to go back into that interaction and be able to listen to what the
other person has to say without feeling really threatened and needing to protect and defend
yourself. Okay? The fourth one is to put yourself into a kind of growth mindset. So this is this idea that growth and change
are possible and good.
You can grow in understanding.
The other person can also change and grow in understanding.
So believing the other person can change is helpful.
But this kind of like emphasis on growth
is something that we've learned
helps people embrace intellectual humility.
I imagine a lot of people who are parents
if they're listening to this would say like,
oh, well, intellectual humility,
that's something I definitely would want my kid to have.
I am not a parent and my heart goes out to all of you,
parents out there.
And it's a wonderful job and it's really, really important.
And I have friends and I have siblings with kids
and they do worry about this, which is interesting.
Even about the humility thing specifically.
So how can you encourage this in kids as a parent?
I will always go back to the kind of practice
what you preach.
So find ways to model it.
Say you're asked a question and you're not sure.
Like don't derogate the question or be like,
how could anyone ever know?
Or on the 15th why question,
just like lose your mind and give up.
It's like, well, I'm not sure,
like try to model intellectual humility, I'm not sure.
Maybe we can try to look it up together.
So modeling is important.
Celebrating intellectual humility.
It's really hard for a kid to be vulnerable in certain settings
and just be like, I was wrong. I got that wrong. I don't understand. I don't know. Showing that to
another person can be tough. So when that happens, that's a good thing to celebrate. Wow, I'm so
that's a good thing to celebrate. Like, wow, I'm so proud of how brave you are to admit that.
That's a really good sign of character.
Like, I'm really proud of you for doing that.
So celebrating when your child has humility
is really important.
I don't know if you've studied this,
but I wonder if there's also a gender gap
in intellectual humility.
Because I certainly think that a lot of the ideas
of what it means to be a man in society
have to do with this decisiveness and certainty
and not backing down.
And I think that there's so many ways
in which these strict gender roles like trap men and
Don't allow them to grow or to be their full selves. That's super interesting. It's a great point
and what we see is that
teenage boys are a lot more likely to endorse the idea that
are a lot more likely to endorse the idea that it's bad to show any kind of weakness. So if we look at boys and girls on that kind of survey item, the boys are like, I don't
want to show weakness and admitting you don't know something, if it's a sign of weakness,
they think it as a sign of weakness, like it's not a good thing to do. So there definitely
are gender dynamics working here. But what we also see, and perhaps this is linked to some
research showing that girls and young women feel this pressure to be sort of
perfect, is that when it comes to say, like, raising your hand to speak up in a
class and say, I don't understand that or I don't know what that is.
When you're kind of showing that to the whole class and interrupting the class to take the
class's time to do that, that's something that girls are much more hesitant about doing than
boys are. We see that in lots of studies. So we find in those studies that when the teacher has
modeled that humility first, girls become
a lot more comfortable voicing their own questions in that setting.
And that gap between boys and girls and how comfortable they are voicing their question
closes.
Yeah, it also makes me think that if you're non-binary or if you don't fit into the spectrum,
I imagine that that actually requires a little bit
more intellectual humility because you just
have to create some of your own path there.
You have to be willing to imagine something that
is outside of a yes or no.
And I wonder if that would actually
require more intellectual humility as well.
But also then, I can see the other side, right?
You also have to have this definitive sense of,
I know this to be true about myself.
And even when everyone else is going to tell me something that's not right, I have to hold
true to that.
So I can see both ways.
I think all of these, right?
There's always these competing tensions, maybe.
It's very intellectually humble of you to see it both ways, and this conversation is
already taking effect.
I like that.
I think that you're right, and I think some of these conversations around gender
are asking us to question categories that are really old
and that have been pretty rigid
and that we can,
asking us to take another look at these categories.
And I think there's real value in doing that.
How would having more intellectual humility
impact our society, right, on this larger level?
How would it change the way that we live in our world
if people across the board really embraced this
and tried to cultivate this?
I think if people really embraced this,
we would see, we would literally see more progress.
I think we would learn more because we would literally see more progress. I think we would learn more
because we would begin to stop holding so tightly
to what we think is true.
So we might question and push the boundaries further,
which would allow us to progress.
You know, right now we're going through
a kind of trauma in the country as folks are divided.
It's hard to even have a conversation with somebody who disagrees with you politically
or is on the other side of the aisle.
And I think if we embrace intellectual humility, we find it's easier to get along and love
each other.
Ta'Neil, thank you so much for being on the show.
It's such a pleasure talking to you.
Thank you so much.
I'm really glad to have been here.
That is it for this episode of How to Be a Better Human.
Thank you so much for listening.
If I got anything wrong, I apologize,
and I will try to be intellectually humble about
doing better in the future.
Thank you so much to today's guest, Dr. Tenille Porter.
I am your host, Chris Duffy, and you can find more from me, including my weekly newsletter
and other projects at chrisduffycomedy.com.
How to Be a Better Human is put together by a team of intellectual giants.
On the TED side, we've got Daniela Belarezzo, Ben Ben Cheng, Chloe Shasha Brooks, Valentina
Bohannini, Lainey Lott, Antonia Leigh, and Joseph Debrine.
This episode was fact-checked by Julia Dickerson and Matthias Salas, who both epitomize the
spirit of accepting and then correcting mistakes.
On the PRX side, they are Humble Royalty, Morgan Flannery, Noragill, Patrick Grant,
and Jocelyn Gonzalez.
Thanks again to you for listening.
Please share this episode with a friend or a family member, someone you know who epitomizes
intellectual humility, or someone who desperately needs to learn more
about intellectual humility.
Either way, share it with them.
Thank you for helping us to spread the word about this show.
We will be back next week with even more
how to be a better human.
Until then, take care.