Can Developing Virtues Improve Dialogue Across Political Difference?

After the polarizing 2016 presidential election, I heard from many distressed students who felt they lacked the skills or confidence to have difficult conversations with those who disagreed with them politically. In response, I developed a course that aims to help students grow in the virtues and skills necessary for listening and dialogue, putting these to use discussing controversial issues including abortion, gun rights and regulations, cancel culture, speech on campus, immigration, environmental policy, and kneeling for the national anthem. In this article, I make the case for foregrounding virtues such as attentiveness, curiosity, intellectual humility, and empathy to promote good dialogue and prepare students to engage productively across difference. Then, I describe the course design, share qualitative results from student reflections, and highlight insights that are applicable across disciplines. Finally, I address practical obstacles and ethical concerns that have arisen when teaching polarizing topics and offer responses to these challenges.

Humble and Apologetic? Predicting Apology Quality with Intellectual and General Humility

Apologies are powerful predictors of reconciliation, but transgressors often fail to offer optimal, high-quality apologies that are comprehensive and non-defensive. We tested whether intellectual humility and general humility predict the use of high-quality apologies versus taking no action to resolve a conflict, and the processes that mediate these associations using online vignette experiments. In Study 1 (N = 397), transgressors with greater intellectual humility offered higher-quality apologies and were less likely to take no action following a relational offense. However, these associations did not remain significant when controlling for general humility. In Study 2 (N = 394), intellectual humility uniquely predicted greater apology comprehensiveness and less inaction following an intellect-based offense, demonstrating its context-specific associations with apology behavior. By contrast, general humility was a robust predictor of higher-quality apologies and less inaction across offense contexts. Consistent with recent theorizing on psychological barriers to apologizing, both studies also found support for the mediating roles of empathic effort and self-protection.

Reports of the Death of Expertise May Be Exaggerated: Limits on Knowledge Resistance in Health and Medicine

During the past decade the idea that expertise is dead, or at best moribund, has become commonplace. Knowledge resistance appears to be growing more politicized and is increasing across a wide range of science-based topics, such as agriculture, evolution and genetics, vaccination, and climate change; even flat-earth beliefs are undergoing a renaissance. But in many of these areas, denying expert authority is cost-free in everyday behavior, making it more rational for people to prize identity and group affiliation over realism. To probe the health of expertise in a domain with everyday consequences for knowledge resistance, we conducted three incentive-compatible studies of laypeople’s preferences for sources of information they would read about specific medical conditions (e.g., heart disease, cancer, COVID-19). We found quite rational preference patterns, by which people preferred sources based on experts (physicians and scientists) over non-experts (celebrities and politicians) and group consensus (professional societies, polls) over individual opinions. These findings held most strongly for issues of personal medical concern, but were robust for less concerning health conditions, and for the highly politicized topic of COVID-19. Individuals who scored higher in intellectual humility and preferences for rational over experiential thinking were more likely to prefer the most expert sources. Expertise retains broad respect in the medical domain, at least when one’s own health is at stake.

The relevance of the Foucauldian lines "Certainly everything must be published, but can we agree on what everything means" to publications in scientific journals.

This short communication deals with the issue of publishing positive and negative results in publications of science journals. Foucault's engaging lines from "What is an author?" considered for Fredrich Nietzsche's total body of work in terms of "praise," and "critique" is considered analogously to "positive" and "negative" results obtained from experiments. This presentation highlights the need to publish negative results, with recent literature calling for injecting 'intellectual humility in a scientific publication.