For whom does intellectual humility become disadvantageous?

I’m not one to suppress my enthusiasm, and so I’ll just come out and say: I really like this review paper1, and I hope you take the time to read it.

It centers on intellectual humility, a construct that Tenelle Porter and her co-authors note has been examined through multiple disciplinary lenses, including personality science, organizational behavior, positive psychology, education, and culture. And while attention across disciplines is a good thing, in theory, for some scientific constructs (including intellectual humility), it can result in “multiple definitions and assessments, raising a question about commonality across definitions of the concept.”

In this review, the authors attempt to find the commonality across definitions for intellectual humility. Through their critical synthesis, they pinpoint what they call “the common element” across myriad studies. Intellectual humility, they assert, is:

“a metacognitive ability to recognize the limitations of one’s beliefs and knowledge.”

Feels salient at this moment in time, doesn’t it? This ability to recognize the limitations of one’s beliefs and knowledge?

It does for me, too, and not just in the social-cultural-political realm. There’s something quite personal in this paper, for me; something in that last section, on that final page, that fairly made me catch my breath:

“Situational contexts in which intellectual humility helps or does not help remain unexplored. Research identifying when and for whom intellectual humility becomes disadvantageous would help to address this gap.”

Research identifying when and for whom intellectual humility becomes disadvantageous.

The reason that clause made me catch my breath? I saw myself in it. My own displays of intellectual humility have of late become disadvantageous to me.

I’m not in a position to burn professional bridges at this moment in time, so I won’t share specific anecdotes, but basically what’s happened to me is that my former intellectually humble declarations — for example, those that I’ve never worked on a certain kind of project, or in a particular business context — have been brought up repeatedly by colleagues (in positions of power, and sometimes in front of others) as a preamble to telling me things I already know (Rebecca Solnit, anyone?), and sometimes as a prelude to telling me what I probably don’t know, as in, “You’ve never worked in context X before, so you may not know Y.”

Reader, I know this is not a unique experience. I know that those in relative positions of power have been telling others things they already know — or making bold, baseless assertions around knowledge gaps — since very likely forever. But what feels unique here for me is being able to draw a direct line from this patronizing treatment to my own intellectually humble assertions which — at the time, for me — felt like the right assertions to make for my own benefit and the benefit of my team.

Being honest in this way has helped set realistic expectations for when I might deliver a project. It’s allowed me to advocate for dedicated time to learn. Hell, it even got me a job once; in 2019, I applied for a role that called for applicants who had written “hundreds of thousands of lines of production Python code.” At that time, I’d written exactly zero lines of production Python code, and made sure everyone at each stage in the interview process knew it. I later learned that this honesty was the reason they gave me the job over more experienced Python developers who had tried to inflate their skills during the interview process.

There are benefits for your teammates, too. I’ve argued elsewhere that I think one of the most challenging and important things a software developer should be able to do is to raise their hand in front of their team and say, “I don’t know how to do that yet.” The act requires honesty, integrity, and a great deal of confidence, but to do otherwise — to dissemble one’s knowledge and skill gaps — puts many things at risk. Code and product quality, for example. Customer experience. Delivery efficiency. Relationships with teammates.

What’s all this got to do with incidents in the software engineering domain?

Perhaps obviously, responding to incidents can require engineers to recognize the limits of their knowledge and abilities. In an incident response scenario, not only are engineers potentially operating with limited or incomplete information, but the stakes can be quite high. And as Porter, et. al, write, “people are less likely to exhibit intellectual humility when the stakes are high”, and as a software engineer, the stakes rarely feel higher than when the application is down, or when there’s a critical security vulnerability that must be addressed.

In these sorts of high-stakes, anxiety-inducing situations, might engineers feel pressured to double down on their initial assessments, even when evidence exists to suggest that they’re wrong? Might they be disinclined to practice intellectual humility?

Or, more concerningly, might the ideas and solutions of those team members who have expressed intellectual humility in the past be discounted, or ignored, either implicitly or explicitly? In other words, in the context of software incident response, for whom does intellectual humility become disadvantageous?

These are just two research questions we might ask about intellectual humility in this domain. They wouldn’t be easy questions to answer, and I won’t pretend to know which research methods are best suited for these inquiries (although I think discourse analysis of “war room” transcripts could provide interesting and illuminating data).

As you read this paper, I encourage you to consider additional worthy research questions in your own context. I encourage you to consider how your own displays of intellectual humility facilitate the undermining of your ideas, contributions, clout, etc., and I certainly encourage you to be on the lookout for when and how you can be an advocate for others. I’m learning how to fight back when others use my own honest declarations to dismiss me as an unworthy or unqualified contributor, but this is an area where we can all be allies to each other.