Interventions specifically designed to foster humility

Rather than merely foster the determinants of humility, researchers have also developed interventions that are purposefully designed to elicit humility—especially intellectual humility.  One of these interventions is predicated on the notion that people tend to feel less defensive if they can establish trusting relationships.  Thorson et al. (2025), for example, designed and validated an intervention that revolves around four guided conversations.  Each conversation was designed to enable pairs of individuals to practice specific norms and expectations they learned in a classroom to address a challenging situation.  Here is an outline of these four conversations:

• Expectation: Show we care about the feelings and perspectives of the other person even if we disagree.  In response to a series of prompts, participants shared their values with one another, paraphrased one another to demonstrate understanding, and discussed how their values were similar and different.
• Expectation: We acknowledge that our beliefs could be incorrect. Participants discussed two scenarios that are morally ambiguous.  They each shared how they would respond to the circumstance and paraphrased the responses of one another. They also considered how their background or values may have influenced their perspectives.
• Expectation: We welcome clumsy conversations and forgive errors: Participants discussed an issue about which they feel strongly.  They asked each other guided questions to explore these opinions.  Next, the participants discussed these opinions, exploring how they feel when other people misconstrue or disapprove these perspectives.
• Expectation: We manage our emotions during conversations. Participants identified an issue over which they disagree.  The individuals explained their position in turn, followed a guide to ask each other questions, and paraphrased one another.  Finally, the participants discussed the similarities and differences in their opinions.

After each conversation, the participants, who comprised over 9000 adults, individually answered some questions that were designed to assess their potential to become friends, their trust in this person, and the degree to which they felt accepted by this person.  They also completed a measure of intellectual humility both before the intervention as well as immediately after and a month after the intervention.  A sample item was “I accept that my beliefs may be wrong”.

Intellectual humility did significantly improve over time. If the potential to become friends, trust, and degree to which they felt accepted by the other person was elevated, this improvement was especially pronounced.  That is, a sense of affiliation during these conversations amplified the effect of this intervention on intellectual humility.  Arguably, this sense of affiliation diminishes the need in individuals to inflate themselves.  Individuals do not feel as defensive, fostering their willingness to acknowledge their limitations (for a similar theory, see Itzchakov & Reis 2021).  

Introduction

Instead of more confined interventions, some researchers have designed more comprehensive interventions, comprising multiple activities, to foster humility.  For example, Harmon-Jones et al. (2025) designed a program that comprises a blend of videos and writing tasks.  Specifically, across four separate days, participants watched four videos including

• a video that utilises expansive images to depict the universe, adapted from Stellar et al. (2018),
• a video that outlines the Dunning-Kruger, presented in TED-Ed,
• a speech in which Ash Barty, an Australian tennis player, exudes humility,
• a video in which swimwear designer, Cristel Carrisi, discusses how she recognises, understands, and owns her own mistakes.

In addition, also across four separate days, participants completed four writing tasks:

• on one day, they wrote for three minutes about a time they behaved altruistically and five minutes about their strengths and limitations (cf Lavelock et al., 2014),
• one the second day, they wrote for 10 minutes a letter of gratitude to someone and the impact of this person on their lives,
• on the third day, they wrote for 8 minutes about their day while refraining from the word “I” to focus on the inherent value of people, objects, and experiences,
• on the fourth day, they wrote about how other people, luck, and other forces contributed towards their accomplishments.
• finally, on the fifth day, they wrote about a time they experienced awe.

In the control condition, participants completed similar tasks, except the videos and writing were not designed to foster humility.  At various times, participants also completed measures that assess feelings of anger, fear, happiness, and relaxation. To measure humility, these individuals also indicated the degree to which they felt modest, open-minded, down-to-earth, respectful, and tolerant.  The intervention significantly increased levels of humility and diminished levels of anger.  

According to many scholars, the pressure on academics and researchers to publish and to attract research income compromises humility.  That is, to impress reviewers and judges, academics feel compelled to inflate the significance, novelty, and validity of their research rather than genuinely acknowledge the limitations of this work.  Indeed, many journals and funders explicitly welcome only research that is transformative and groundbreaking (Kail, 2012), perhaps overlooking the observation that research seldom fulfills these attributes.  Consequently, over recent decades, the proportion of positive words in scientific papers has soared (Vinkers et al., 2015).

Yet, despite this pressure to inflate the value of their research, most scientists and researchers cherish intellectual humility (Anderson et al., 2007).  These individuals believe that researchers must acknowledge the limitations, flaws, ambiguities, or uncertainty of their work.  If this intellectual humility wanes, the public will become increasingly dubious about research (e.g., Pashler & De Ruiter, 2017).  The impact and benefits of such research will thus plummet.

To address this concern, Hoekstra and Vazire (2021) suggested that reviewers should be encouraged to evaluate manuscripts partly on the degree to which the authors demonstrated intellectual humility. In contrast to journal editors and some other stakeholders, reviewers are uniquely positioned because they tend to value intellectual humility and experience no incentive to prefer research in which the claims may be exaggerated.  To enable reviewers to evaluate the intellectual humility of manuscripts, Hoekstra and Vazire (2021) suggest a series of 19 criteria these reviews should consider.  For example, the manuscript should

• specify the limitations and boundary conditions of the main conclusions in the abstract,
• acknowledge rather than overlook some of the contradictions in the literature—rather than attempt to propose a misleading sense of coherence,
• stipulate when the researchers or academics reached decisions about data collection, transformations of data, analyses, and so forth,
• when summarising the results, include the full range of findings—including the most damning patterns,
• present alternative explanations of results as convincingly as possible,
• acknowledge limitations of the research throughout the discussion rather than confine these limitations to a circumscribed section at the end,
• after publication, insist that press releases or public reports about the research acknowledge the limitations and correct exaggerations or misrepresentations of this research.