How Humility Can Restore Trust in Expertise

Acknowledging the limits of one’s own knowledge could be as important a signal of expertise as credentials and confidence.

Whom would you trust more: an expert who seems to have all the answers or one who admits what they don’t know? We have spent the past five years studying that question and the many ways people respond.

Our research was sparked by a recurring tension we both noticed early in our academic careers. Our graduate studies made us aware of how little we knew about our respective research areas, even as we developed specialized knowledge in these fields. Scholars call this self-awareness “intellectual humility,” and it’s something we suspect many experts encounter as they transition into a new role.

Yet barely anyone seemed to expect us to be intellectually humble in our then new positions. People seemed to engage with us as know-it-all, capital-E experts who could confidently answer any questions that were even remotely related to our specialties. The scariest part was that we could have easily exploited these opportunities to share our opinions on topics well beyond our expertise.

These experiences got us thinking about the importance of humility among experts. There is value in having confidence in what you know, but being truthful about the limits of your knowledge is also important, even if it’s not always encouraged. Research has linked intellectual humility with many desirable behaviors, including considering others’ perspectives, being better at conflict resolution and being less dogmatic. Conversely, when experts claim to know more than they do, this is not only a betrayal of trust but also potentially disastrous for promoting healthy public discourse.

Given these high stakes, we decided to study how people think about expertise. Across our first set of studies – designed to unearth various beliefs about expertise – our results suggested that most people assume that exceptional knowledge defines expertise. The notion that expertise is defined by getting results was also a recurring tendency, as was the belief that specialist education is central to expertise.

At first glance, these understandings of expertise seem benign. Our concern, though, is that relying on these criteria alone may leave some people vulnerable to perceiving expertise in those who simply project confidence. Much research has shown that the link between confidence and competence is far from straight forward. From this standpoint, defining expertise in terms of knowledge and capability may ironically make people more vulnerable to following those who merely project these qualities rather than actual experts.

We argue that humility is a trait worth valuing just as much as competence when thinking about experts. Across our datasets, a small portion of respondents linked expertise with intellectual humility. Indeed, one survey participant noted that to be an expert is to come to the “humble realization that you’ll always be a student and there is a lot more to learn.” Our studies also showed that expecting experts to be all-knowing might contribute to significant problems. For example, people could develop unrealistically high expectations of experts, leading to disappointment or resentment when they fail to deliver on those expectations. Some of the tweets we gathered during the pandemic pointed to such frustration, with one person writing, “Your ‘experts’ have caused 1000s to die.”

After our initial studies, we dug deeper into attitudes around humble experts with two online experiments with managers. In both experiments, participants watched one of three videos. One video highlighted the value of a humble expert. Another depicted the upsides of a highly confident expert. And the third acted as a control that focused on negotiation styles. After they watched the videos, we asked participants to imagine themselves working with (experiment one) or recruiting (experiment two) someone in an expert role who was open about their limitations. Across these experiments, we found that showing people a short and simple video that explained the virtues of a humble expert led those participants to rate their more humble colleague as more of an expert than those participants who watched the other videos.

In future research, we want to see if it’s possible to create more substantial changes in how people understand expertise—changes that endure for weeks, months and potentially years. We want to know whether helping people prize intellectual humility in experts might make them better at detecting when someone is venturing beyond the boundaries of their expertise.

In the spirit of humility, we also need to acknowledge our work’s limitations. Our research is not a perfect fix for people’s vulnerability to experts who claim to know all. But ultimately, it suggests that we can shift people’s thinking about experts to create environments that foster intellectual humility. Doing so seems especially valuable, given the potential for intellectual humility in helping experts gain public trust.

Although humility is not the first quality most people consider when they think “expert,” societies can take steps to strengthen this mental link. Doing so can ensure that humble experts, who are transparent about the limits of their expertise, are there to help humanity tackle our world’s most urgent challenges.