Under Professor Stephanie Preston’s mentorship, I am conducting my Honors Thesis on the relationship between intellectual humility and perceived moral correctness. Intellectual humility is a cognitive phenomenon that captures an awareness of the limits of one’s knowledge and an acceptance that one’s beliefs might be wrong. My study tests whether people who believe their political opinions are in the moral right (as opposed to simply logically or factually correct) are less willing to entertain the fallibility of their opinions. I predict that when people believe their opinions are more morally justified, they will also have lower intellectual humility. This summer I ran a 50-person pilot study to determine which political issues to examine, and in the fall I will run my main survey to examine the relationship between individuals’ intellectual humility and moral perceptions across three topics.
