Does Collaborative Dialogue Increase Intellectual Humility About Ethics and Politics?

A large body of theoretical and empirical work suggests that engaging in rigorous but respectful and supportive dialogue should increase intellectual humility. We put this “collaborative dialogue hypothesis” to the test in three main studies (total N = 3,004 observations from N = 1,740 adolescents) plus three supplemental studies. Using quasi-experimental designs, Studies 1-2 tested whether students involved in an extracurricular program focused on collaborative dialogue about ethical and political issues experience more growth in intellectual humility than their peers. Study 3, a randomized experiment, tested whether almost an hour of collaborative dialogue increases intellectual humility. Despite a comprehensive approach, involving a variety of methods and measures (including self-reports, behavioral indicators, and text-analytic measures), our results consistently contradicted the hypothesis. It is possible that collaborative dialogue increases intellectual humility about topics other than ethics and politics or only under certain conditions. Yet, these findings highlight a need for new, more domain-specific theories and further tests of popular claims about how to cultivate this much-needed trait.