Do we really think our politicians should be intellectually humble?

Abstract

In recent years, researchers have investigated how intellectual humility (IH) might help reduce political polarization among everyday U.S. Americans. In the current work, we examine whether people think politicians should exhibit IH and how this might depend on context. In preregistered Study 1 (N = 477), participants read about and reported their ideal level of IH for a fictional ingroup or outgroup politician in contexts that were either cooperative or competitive. Across both contexts, participants thought outgroup politicians should have higher IH than ingroup politicians. They also thought ingroup (and to a lesser extent outgroup) politicians should have higher IH in cooperative than competitive contexts. In preregistered Study 2 (N = 843), we randomly assigned participants to read about a fictional ingroup or outgroup politician who expressed high or low IH in different contexts. We found that perceptions of IH played a significant role in perceptions of competence, warmth, and intention to vote for the politician. However, the impact of IH was larger for outgroup politicians than ingroup politicians, with the exception of voting intentions. We also asked participants to report their ideal and perceived level of IH for then-presidential candidates Joe Biden and Donald Trump. We found an intergroup bias in that participants perceived the ingroup candidate as having higher IH than the outgroup candidate. Importantly, perceptions of IH significantly predicted voting intentions for these politicians. Overall, this work points to the importance and nuanced role of IH in political person perception.