Please mark your calendars for the psychology colloquium on Wednesday, April 10th at 3:30pm. Please join us at BOUS A106 as we welcome Dr. Igor Grossmann, Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Waterloo. Dr. Grossmann will be presenting his work titled “Deconstructing Wisdom and Intellectual Humility in an Uncertain and Polarized World.” We look forward to having you with us! Your participation and insights would be greatly valued.
Abstract: In a time of disagreements about values, politics, and cultural practices, psychological scientists have turned to possible antidotes to societal acrimony – the concepts of wisdom and intellectual humility. Interest in these concepts has come from diverse research areas, including leadership and organizational behavior, personality science, positive psychology, judgment/decision-making, education, culture, and intergroup and interpersonal relationships. Yet, what are the psychological features of wisdom in general or intellectual humility in particular? I will critically examine the diverse approaches to defining and measuring these constructs. I will also describe what many scientists studying intellectual humility see as common across a myriad of definitions: meta-cognitive awareness of one’s fallibility and limits of knowledge. After establishing common ground across definitions and reviewing the validity of different measurement approaches, I will highlight research that explores the role of macro- and micro-level factors – from relationship security to interdependence in social coordination – for these characteristics. I will also review empirical evidence concerning benefits and drawbacks of these characteristics for personal decision-making, interpersonal relationships, scientific enterprise, and society writ large. I will conclude with new directions concerning ecologically-sensitive measuring of these characteristics among less-educated rural samples in Honduras, and AI-based annotation systems for scoring unstructured text responses for meta-cognitive and moral features at scale.
For more information, contact: Merrisa Lin at merrisa.lin@uconn.edu