Self-afirmation and openness to change

Two experiments examined the effects of self-affirmation on intellectual humility, which we conceptualise as openness to opposing views and a willingness to listen and engage with them in discussion. In the first experiment, 303 participants completed a manipulation of self-affirmation using values ratings. We then recorded 116 in-person group discussions, which were coded by linguists who were blind to condition. As expected, the self-affirmation task increased the coded intellectual humility, as well as participants’ humble emotions (e.g., humble, respectful, empathic) prior to the discussions. In a second experiment using a similar design, but with online discussions, we recruited 722 participants and replicated the effect of self-affirmation on humble emotions, but found no consistent impact on coded intellectual humility. A manipulation of which values were affirmed within the self-affirmation task did not moderate these effects. An aim for ongoing research is to discover whether the difference in impact between experiments is due to differences in the structure of in-person vs online dialogue or to the lesser availability of visual and tonal cues in online chats.