Intellectual humility (IH) is needed now more than ever, but existing research on the nature, measurement, and cultivation of IH is in its infancy. Existing research does not typically take into account the interaction between IH and inter-group conflict, which is arguably the most important context in which IH should be manifested. The proposed research will address this crucial gap in the literature using methods from personality and social psychology, computational linguistics, network theory, and virtue epistemology. This interdisciplinary mixture of methods is essential to addressing the problem in its full complexity, and the range of expertise represented by our team means we are well-poised to complete it.

What does intellectual humility mean in the context of inter-group disagreement and conflict? We spend most of our time with family, friends, and colleagues, so IH towards them is important. However, our largest disagreements are likely to be with those who do not belong to our “tribe.” It might therefore seem that IH towards members of outgroups is essential to understanding and resolving intergroup conflict. These competing priorities have come to the fore because “tribal epistemology” has infected political and social discourse. Deferring to members of one’s ingroup is liable to intensify conflicts with outgroups, but criticizing one’s ingroup runs the risk of appearing or being intellectually arrogant and can lead to social exclusion. Being a Socratic gadfly — someone disposed to turn a critical eye to their own community’s conventional wisdom in order to goad the community into reflection and reform — is challenging and risky. The goal of this project is to investigate the best ways to practice IH within one’s community and towards outsiders, then disseminate this knowledge with other scholars and the public. We aim to show that this requires a two-tiered approach: at the individual level, agents need to cultivate dispositions and strategies that contribute to IH in complex, interlocking ways. At the community level, the trust and distrust relations within and between groups need to be structured in particular ways that enable people to speak to and learn from those who do not belong to their communities.

This project represents the first attempt to examine the best ways to practice IH not only towards one’s ingroup but also towards members of outgroups. We aim to establish which dispositions, practices, and structural arrangements are most conducive to respectful and responsible discourse and inquiry in a fragmented and pluralistic social world. Our project thus addresses the problem of filter bubbles and echo chambers from both descriptive and normative perspectives. In so doing, we will offer a detailed, systematic, and empirically-informed account of social virtue epistemology and the role of intellectual humility in social networks. In addition, this project promises to furnish insights into the epistemology of deliberation and polarization about pressing and controversial topics.

This project analyzes and evaluates both (a) the dispositions that support IH within and between groups and (b) how the structure of epistemic communities fosters or inhibits IH given people’s epistemic strengths and weaknesses. We will model such communities as directed networks, in which nodes represent epistemic agents and edges represent lines of trusted communication. Communities can then be operationalized either semantically (people who tend to use language in the same way, as indicated by topic modeling) or socially (people who tend to talk to each other but not to others, as indicated by various measures of clustering). Given such a framework, we ask two questions:

1. Holding the geometry of the network constant, which epistemic dispositions support the IH of nodes at different positions in the network?

2. Holding the distribution of people’s epistemic dispositions constant, which network geometries are more likely to foster engagement that manifests IH?

To address these questions, we combine virtue-theoretic reflection on individual dispositions with the social epistemology and social science of networks.

Publications:

• Alfano, M. (forthcoming). Virtues for agents in directed social networks. Synthese.

• Alfano, M. & Sullivan, E. (forthcoming). Online trust and doubt. In M. Hannon & J. de Ridder (eds.), Handbook of Political Epistemology. Routledge.

• Sullivan, E., & Alfano, M. (forthcoming). A normative framework for sharing information online. In C. Véliz (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Digital Ethics. Oxford University Press.

• Sullivan, E. & Alfano, M. (forthcoming). Vectors of epistemic insecurity. In I. J. Kidd, H. Battaly, & Q. Cassam (eds.), Vice Epistemology: Theory and Practice. Routledge.

• Alfano, M. & Sullivan, E. (forthcoming). Humility in networks. In A. Tanesini, M. Lynch, & M. Alfano (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Humility. Routledge.

• Alfano, M., Carter, J. A., Ebrahimi Fard, A., Clutton, P., & Klein, C. (forthcoming). Technologically scaffolded atypical cognition: The case of YouTube’s recommender system. Synthese.

• Sullivan, E., Sondag, M., Rutter, I., Meulemans, W., Cunningham, S., Speckmann, B., & Alfano, M. (2020). Can real social epistemic networks deliver the wisdom of crowds? In T. Lombrozo, J. Knobe, & S. Nichols (eds.), Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy. Oxford University Press.

• Sullivan, E., Sondag, M., Rutter, I., Meulemans, W., Cunningham, S., Speckmann, B. & Alfano, M. (2020). Vulnerability in social epistemic networks. International Journal of Philosophical Studies.

• Alfano, M. & Huijts, N. (2020). Trust and distrust in institutions and governance. In J. Simon (ed.), Handbook of Trust and Philosophy. Routledge.

• Levy, N. & Alfano, M. (2019). Knowledge from vice: Deeply social epistemology. Mind.

• Alfano, M. & Sullivan, E. (2019). Negative epistemic exemplars. In B. Sherman & S. Goguen (eds.), Overcoming Epistemic Injustice: Social and Psychological Perspectives. Rowman & Littlefield.

• Iurino, K., Robinson, B., Christen, M., Stey, P., & Alfano, M. (2018). Constructing and validating a scale of inquisitive curiosity. In I. Inan, L. Watson, D. Whitcomb, & S. Yigit, (eds.), The Moral Psychology of Curiosity. Rowman & Littlefield.

• Christen, M., Alfano, M., & Robinson, B. (2017). A cross-cultural assessment of the semantic dimensions of intellectual humility. AI & Society.

• Alfano, M., Iurino, K., Stey, P., Robinson, B, Christen, M., Yu, F., & Lapsley, D. (2017). Development and validation of a multi-dimensional measure of intellectual humility. PLoS ONE.

• Alfano, M. & Robinson, B. (2017). Gossip as a burdened virtue. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice.

• Alfano, M. (2017). The topology of communities of trust. Russian Sociological Review, 15(4): 30-56.

• Alfano, M. & Skorburg, A. (2017). Extended knowledge, the recognition heuristic, and epistemic injustice. In D. Pritchard, J. Kallestrup, O. Palermos, & J. A. Carter (eds.), Extended Knowledge. Oxford University Press.

• Alfano, M. & Skorburg, A. (2017). The embedded and extended character hypotheses. In J. Kiverstein (ed.), Handbook of Philosophy of the Social Mind. Routledge.

• Alfano, M. (2016). Friendship and the structure of trust. In A. Masala & J. Webber (eds.), From Personality to Virtue: Essays in the Psychology and Ethics of Character. Oxford University Press.

 Tutorials:

• Developing corpus analysis as an interdisciplinary tool in cognitive science: R Studio pipeline

Visualizations: