Intellectual Humility and Probabilistic Belief

Abstract

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.