Researchers tested whether saying “there’s an X% chance” links to greater intellectual humility. They looked at students and representative national samples, comparing whether the same person felt more humble about beliefs they expressed probabilistically rather than in binary terms. The results showed that within individuals, political and moral views framed with probabilities tended to come with a more humble attitude, even after accounting for how strongly people held those views.
If people can learn to express uncertain judgments more often, the social effects could be important. Probabilistic language might make conversations less combative, allow facts to change minds, and create space for wider participation in public life. Follow the full article to see how a small change in how we speak about beliefs could influence openness, disagreement, and inclusion in politics and moral debate.
Abstract
It is natural to express some beliefs in binary terms (P is either believed or not, e.g., “bribery is immoral”), and others in terms of a subjective probability (P has some probability of being true, e.g., “there’s an 80% chance a Democrat will win the next election”). Construing a belief in probabilistic terms (other than 0% or 100%) implicitly conveys a recognition of uncertainty (one’s ignorance) and the possibility of being wrong (one’s fallibility), which are key characteristics of intellectual humility (IH). Across two studies, we explore the hypothesis that probabilistic belief is associated with greater IH. Although we fail to find this association across participants, comparing their trait-level IH, in either a student sample (Study 1, N = 279) or two nationally representative samples (Study 2a, N = 269; Study 2b, N = 270), we do find the predicted association within participants, analyzing belief-specific IH (Studies 2a and 2b): political and moral beliefs that are classified as probabilistic rather than binary are associated with a more intellectually humble attitude toward those beliefs, even controlling for the extremity of belief. These findings support the psychological reality of a distinction between binary and probabilistic belief, and further raise the possibility that promoting probabilistic belief could foster greater IH, including in consequential domains such as politics and morality.
