Do You Have "Intellectual Humility"? Here's Why It Can Help You Become Smarter

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I should know how to write good headlines.

Honestly, I don’t.

It’s a professional liability. As a magazine editor, I write headlines all the time. I also know the best practices, and I have worked with brilliant headline writers. But still, I am not good at it. You see that headline at the top of this post? I have truly no idea if it will drive anyone to read this.

But I’m OK admitting it. Here’s why:

First, when we admit what we do not know, we normalize human flaws.

But second, and more importantly, admitting what we don't know can actually increase our capacity to learn.

How? Come along — we’ll learn something that neither of us knew before, and then hear some very smart people admit what they don’t know either.

Why it’s good to admit what you don’t know

Here’s a nice phrase: intellectual humility. It means, in short, the willingness to admit what you don’t know — and valuing what someone else knows better.

I found it in an old article by Tenelle Porter, a development researcher at the University of California, Davis. She was describing a fascinating study she did on high school students, where she tracked how intellectual humility impacted their ability to learn.

Her results: The more that students displayed an intellectual humility, the more intellectual they became.

“More intellectually humble students were more motivated to learn and more likely to use effective metacognitive strategies, like quizzing themselves to check their own understanding,” she wrote. They also got better grades in math, were more likely to seek extra help when they were having trouble, and their teachers found them to be more engaged learners.

Those students had what’s often called a growth mindset, or a belief that intelligence (or anything else) can increase over time. The alternative, of course, is a fixed mindset — which, in this case, could mean believing that everyone’s potential intelligence is limited, and that you’re born with whatever you’ve got.

The results of this study are satisfying to read, but they shouldn’t be that surprising. When someone displays intellectual humility, they are acknowledging a gap between what they know and what they could know. But they’re not ashamed of it, because they simply see that gap as a bridge not yet crossed. It is something to work towards.

So, what don’t very smart people know?

It can be hard to admit what we don’t know, so let’s take some cues from people who know a lot… but not everything.

We can start with scientists, whose actual job is to identify knowledge gaps and fill them.

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, an astrophysicist who won the Nobel Prize in physics, how believing that you “must be right” can hold you back from learning. And a publication called The Fence recently asked a bunch of Nobel laureates to admit what parts of their fields they don’t understand.

The answers are a delight — because jeez, it makes me feel a little less bad about not understanding any of this stuff either!

Here are two examples.

Professor David MacMillan, a 2021 Nobel winner in chemistry, won the Nobel for building a tool that creates molecules (which, by the way, has made pharmaceutical research a lot more efficient). He admitted:

“Honestly, I couldn’t understand theoretical chemistry if my life depended on it.”

Now here’s Professor Anthony Leggett, the 2003 Nobel winner in physics, who won for his pioneering work on superfluidity. (That’s a substance’s ability to flow without friction; I had to look it up.) He said:

“Well, I missed out on standard high-school physics, so have always been a bit confused about simple things like why the noise from a kettle stops as the water nears boiling.”

Both MacMilan and Leggett also admitted that they’re bad at long division. Me too!

These are smart people. Neither of them could have discovered anything — let alone their groundbreaking findings — without first admitting that there are new things for them to find out.

But of course, the average person isn’t expected to understand how a kettle boils — let alone theoretical chemistry, which I didn’t even know was a thing. So let’s take it down to earth a little more. Yesterday, I texted some of my favorite fellow Bulletin writers to ask what they don’t know, despite their expertise.

Here’s journalist Stefanie O’Connell Rodriguez, who specializes in covering money, power, and ambition:

And here’s best-selling author Nicole Lapin, who helps people get their financial lives in order:

Let it be known that Nicole actually texted me that twice, because she messed up the grammar the first time. I’m sure she won’t mind me sharing that. 😀

To close us out, I’ll admit one more thing that, as an editor, I should be good at and am not: spelling. Isn’t that ridiculious? (Yes, that’s one I get wrong all the time.)

What are you bad at? Own up to it, and maybe you’ll learn something. And then you’ll keep learning.

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Cover credit: Getty Images / Tim Robberts