Practice intellectual humility: "I might be wrong"

Maintain a live list of beliefs you hold with high confidence but acknowledge could be wrong — and say so out loud.

Why it works

Intellectual humility — the accurate calibration of one’s epistemic limitations — is both an Aristotelian virtue and an empirically studied construct. It reduces overconfidence bias, makes a person more receptive to updating on new evidence, and improves the quality of advice-seeking and collaboration. Socrates modeled it: his claimed ignorance was not false modesty but genuine acknowledgment of what he did not know — which made him a more reliable reasoner than those who thought they knew.

How to do it

1. Identify one high-stakes belief you currently hold with 80%+ confidence.
2. Write the best argument against it — genuinely, not as a strawman.
3. Ask someone who disagrees to tell you where your case is weakest.
4. Update your confidence based on what you learn, even if only slightly.

Evidence

Research on intellectual humility (Leary, Krumrei-Mancuso and colleagues) finds that intellectually humble people make better decisions, are more open to updating, and are rated as more trustworthy by peers. (observational)

Most research is correlational — intellectually humble people have better outcomes; training intellectual humility as a practice is less studied than measuring its natural variation.

Sources

• Krumrei-Mancuso, E.J. & Rouse, S.V. (2016), The development and validation of the Comprehensive Intellectual Humility Scale, Journal of Personality Assessment

Common mistake

Performing intellectual humility ("I could be wrong!") as a social script while privately remaining unpersuaded by any counter-evidence — which produces the appearance of openness without the function.