Jonah Koetke's Dissertation Defense

Perceiving scientists as intellectually humble

Jonah Koetke

We are living through global and national uncertainties that science can help address (e.g., climate change, pandemics). However, lack of trust in science and scientists can threaten the ability of science to effectively inform policy, guide public behavior, and contribute solutions to these pressing challenges. How can we increase public trust in scientists and willingness to follow science-based recommendations? In this dissertation, I propose that one pathway to increasing trust in scientists is to see scientists as intellectually humble—aware of their intellectual limitations. Prior work has argued that intellectual humility (IH) is necessary for rigorous science (Hoekstra & Vazire, 2021). Across nine studies, I found that members of the public use a scientist’s IH as a heuristic when deciding if they are trustworthy. In Study 1, participants thought about a range of experts (e.g., doctors, teachers, scientists) and reported the level of IH they thought people in that role should express and how much IH they see them expressing. I found that people wanted scientists to express the highest level of IH across experts. In Study 2, I asked participants to think about the average scientist and report their IH. Seeing scientists as intellectually humble predicted also seeing them as trustworthy and believing polarizing science topics (climate change, vaccinations, GM foods). In Study 3, participants read about an ostensible scientist who was either high, low, or neutral in their IH. Participants saw the high (vs. low) IH scientist as more trustworthy and trusted their research more. I replicated this finding in Studies 4 and 5 where I also tested for moderation by the scientist’s gender (Study 4) and race/ethnicity (Study 5). In Studies 6 and 7, I shifted to examining IH in authentic scientific communications from PsyPost and The Conversation. Trained coders independently rated each communication for IH and trustworthiness, which correlated in Study 6 but not Study 7. Next, in Study 8, I combined methods from the prior studies by randomly assigning participants to read one of several real scientific interviews pre-coded as high or low in IH. I found support for indirect effects of high vs low IH interviews on trustworthiness via perceived IH. Finally, I attempted to identify strategies scientists can use in their communication to convey IH. I first re-analyzed the data from Study 6 to identify linguistic markers of high IH. Finally, in Study 9, I crowdsourced strategies scientists themselves use to communicate their research with IH and tested their effectiveness in a large census-matched experiment. Across studies, I largely found that people trust scientists who are more intellectually humble, but more work is needed to identify reliable cues of IH in public communication.