 So how do we become intellectually humble? There's an age-old debate within psychology called the nature-nurture debate. The essence of this debate is this. Are our personalities and traits, including intellectual humility, more a matter of our genetic makeup, which we inherit from our parents, that is nature, or are they more influenced by our surroundings, how we're raised, how we're rewarded or punished? That is how we are nurtured. The answer is yes. That is, like all human traits, both nature and nurture influence the development of intellectual humility. So one area of investigation worth pursuing is to first determine what kinds of traits an intellectually humble person might have, and then to examine how much the expression of these traits is due to genetic influence. We don't have a lot to say about this right now, since the science of intellectual humility is new, but we can look into how personality psychology has examined the role of genetic inheritance of such enduring traits as open-mindedness and agreeableness and conscientiousness, which are aspects of what are known as the big five personality traits, traits you might expect in an intellectually humble person. Then we can see that these genes determine about 35 to 60% of the expression of these traits in people. We might expect that genes influence the expression of intellectual humility in similar ways. Next, we can turn to developmental psychology for an answer to the question, how do we become intellectually humble? Part of how we answer this question will have to do with how we view human nature and the developing child. Our children, little scientists, like the famous developmental psychologist Jean Piaget, maintain acquiring knowledge through their interaction with the world, experimenting with the world by forming theories about how the world works and testing those theories. Or, since much of our knowledge comes from the people who surround us, our children like little anthropologists who look around the social landscape to see who is trustworthy and a good source of information. How we answer these questions will guide our investigation into the development of intellectual humility. Those who think children are little scientists have proposed a theory of knowledge acquisition that is both widely accepted and particularly well suited to examine the growth and inhibition of intellectual humility in children, a theory developed by Gopnik and Wellman called theory theory. Theory theory posits that children think like little scientists by continually constructing and then revising theories about the structure of the world and the way the world works, including the social world. Children like scientists observe the world and begin to form theories about the makeup of the world, what might cause what, how this or that might work, then through experience they gather more data that either reinforces the theory or revises it. Here's an example from anyone who has interacted with an infant in a high chair. The infant will drop something off the high chair and observe that it falls to the ground. The adult nearby will pick it up and return it to the child and the child will promptly again drop the object and this repeats ad nauseam. Now, the child may be testing a theory of gravity, that is, do things drop from a high position, fall to the ground if there's nothing to obstruct the fall? However, the child is also observing that the adult nearby will pick up the object and return it to the child. Perhaps the child is testing a theory that the adult always return an object that has fallen to the ground whenever the child drops it. As the child continues to test these theories by dropping objects over and over and over again, the child begins to see that the theory of gravity is pretty well established. Things when dropped from high places do always seem to fall to the ground. But about the theory that the adult nearby will always return the object, the evidence is more mixed. It seems the adult can tire of the experiment and sometimes pick it up and sometimes not. So using Dr. Church's doxactic account of intellectual humility, we might say that the child holds the theory of gravity with some firmness and certainty. While the theory of the adults picking objects up, she might hold with less firmness since the evidence of that is more spotty. This idea that learning is a process of discovering just how firmly one ought to hold theories about the world has been further refined by Gopnik and Wellman through incorporating ideas from Bayesian statistics into their view of how children learn. Learning in this view is not just the process of holding a single theory about the world and then proving or disproving it before forming another theory that can be tested. It's rather a process of holding many hypotheses that might explain the evidence or the observed phenomena and learning through experience and testing which is more probable. Bayesian learning is the process of assigning weights to any given hypothesis about the world according to how probable that hypothesis is compared to other alternative hypotheses. In the course of theory change, children gradually change the probability of multiple hypotheses rather than simply rejecting or exempting a single hypothesis. This way of thinking about knowledge acquisition fits well with the doxactic account of Dr. Church's Just Outline. Returning to our example, the child in the high chair assigns a high probability to the theory of gravity and we might say the child values this hypothesis highly, whereas the child might assign a hypothesis that the adult will always pick up the object with less weight and even begin to form alternative hypotheses to explain why the adult is inconsistent. Maybe the adult gets tired or maybe the adult is stupid and hold both of these hypotheses at once and begin to value one over the other as experience dictates. Indeed, there have been some experiments along these lines to investigate the development of intellectual humility in children, especially regarding theory revision, that is how long and how firmly do children hold initial theories in the face of new evidence? At a certain point, the weight assigned to the hypothesis is high enough, the theory of the world is valued highly enough so that alternative hypotheses are not entertained. So as the child grows, the child is certain about more and more things, remain open to revision. Finding these points of development will be an important part of future research. This kind of investigation is decidedly within the epistemic side of intellectual humility. On the social side, investigations into how children trust informants is relevant to the study of the development of intellectual humility in children. My colleagues and I investigated how willing children were to trust certain kinds of informants in the name of an object, an unidentified object like this. We showed them cartoon pictures of these informants engaged in different kinds of actions that were determined to be either moral or immoral according to moral intuition theory. For example, we showed a picture of a dark-haired boy pushing down another child in order to get ahead in line and pictured a light-haired boy helping another child. When we told them the dark-haired boy had objected a koozie, while the light-haired boy called it a quinzy and asked them which name they thought was the true name, it revealed which informant they trusted. The results show that the moral character of the informant did influence the information or the informant that the children trusted. Another experiment regarding intellectual humility of informants has also been conducted that revealed children do assess the character of informants as they decide whom to trust and ask for knowledge about the world. Another thing we've learned from the developmental psychology is that children have this paradoxical mixture of intellectual arrogance and intellectual humility. They demonstrate intellectual arrogance in the fact that they grossly overestimate their knowledge in what they know. If you ask a child if they know how a toilet works, for example, they'll say confidently, yes, but when you ask them how it works, they're demfounded. Yet in spite of thinking that they know everything an aspect of intellectual arrogance, they are eager to learn an endearing trait of the intellectually humble. Children are more aware of their mistakes, tend to be more intellectually humble, being more willing to ask for help and advice. Studies also show that children have an incrementalist mindset of intelligence, that is, they believe that intelligence can be developed through study and hard work, are also more intellectually humble. We can confidently claim that children are not just little scientists, but little anthropologists as well. They hold theories of the world and test those theories by their experience, assigning value to certain ideas over others. They are sensitive to the social elements of knowledge acquisition, especially the trustworthiness of informants. Studies into these elements of how children learn supports our understanding of intellectual humility, as having both epistemic and social dimensions. Developmental psychology points us toward the power that cultivating the virtue of intellectual humility can have on learning, specifically the motivation to learn and using effective learning strategies to further knowledge acquisition.