Wednesday 16 January 2019

Intellectual humility: the importance of knowing you might be wrong

a post by Brian Resnick for Vox [with grateful thanks to Tara at ResearchBuzz: Firehose]

Julia Rohrer wants to create a radical new culture for social scientists. A personality psychologist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Rohrer is trying to get her peers to publicly, willingly admit it when they are wrong.

To do this, she, along with some colleagues, started up something called the Loss of Confidence Project. It’s designed to be an academic safe space for researchers to declare for all to see that they no longer believe in the accuracy of one of their previous findings. The effort recently yielded a paper that includes six admissions of no confidence. And it’s accepting submissions until January 31.

“I do think it’s a cultural issue that people are not willing to admit mistakes,” Rohrer says. “Our broader goal is to gently nudge the whole scientific system and psychology toward a different culture,” where it’s okay, normalized, and expected for researchers to admit past mistakes and not get penalized for it.

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The general human condition says ’I am right and that’s the end of it&rdquo. However, after a few years (maybe days or even hours) you realise that you just might have been wrong. New information has come to light, your own thoughts and feelings have changed, whatever. Do you apologise?
Nah, me neither!


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