General Intellectual Humility Is Malleable Through AI-Mediated Reflective Dialogue

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that general intellectual humility can be significantly increased through a structured AI-mediated reflective dialogue, with durable effects lasting at least two weeks and applicable across diverse individuals.

Contribution

It introduces a novel AI-mediated conversational intervention that effectively enhances general intellectual humility, challenging the view that it is a fixed trait.

Findings

Intervention increased GIH and reduced stability over time.

Effects persisted for two weeks without decay.

Results generalized across political and personality differences.

Abstract

General intellectual humility (GIH) -- the recognition that one's beliefs may be fallible and revisable -- is associated with improved reasoning, learning, and social discourse, yet is widely regarded as a stable trait resistant to intervention. We test whether GIH can be elevated through a conversational intervention that combines staged cognitive scaffolding with personalized Socratic reflection. In a randomized controlled experiment (N=400), participants engaged in a structured, LLM-mediated dialogue that progressed from conceptual understanding of intellectual humility to applying, analyzing, evaluating, and generating novel, self-relevant scenarios that instantiate it. Relative to a time-matched control, the intervention produced a systematic increase in GIH, reduced rank-order stability, and tripled the rate of reliable individual improvement. Crucially, these effects persisted over a two-week follow-up without detectable decay. The effects generalized across political affiliation and did not depend on baseline personality profile. These findings challenge the prevailing pessimism regarding the malleability of GIH and suggest that scaffolded, Socratic reflection delivered through structured dialogue can produce durable changes in general intellectual humility.