Most of us have sat in a meeting where someone kept defending a plan long after everyone in the room could see it was failing. Most of us have also been that person at home, holding on to our version of an argument long after we stopped fully believing it. In both cases the problem isn’t intelligence. It is having tied our sense of self to being right. A leader who cannot revise an opinion becomes increasingly dependent on defending it, and the same is true of a partner, a parent, or anyone trying to grow. The longer the defence goes on, the more expensive the eventual correction becomes.
Intellectual Humility: The Psychology of Changing Your Mind
Psychologists call the capacity behind changing your mind well intellectual humility. It means recognising that what you believe might be incorrect and staying genuinely open to evidence that says so. It is not low confidence or constant self-doubt. It is a particular relationship with your own knowledge. In a series of studies, Leary and colleagues (2017) found that people higher in intellectual humility paid closer attention to the quality of evidence, telling strong arguments apart from weak ones, and judged other people less harshly when they changed their minds. The trait turned out to be less about modesty and more about accuracy. People who hold their views a little more loosely tend to see the world, and themselves, more clearly.
So why is being wrong so hard? A classic experiment by Staw (1976) offers part of the answer. Business students were asked to decide how to invest money in a fictional company. When they later learned that their first decision had gone badly, those who had personally made that choice put significantly more money into the same failing area than people who had inherited the decision from someone else. Bad news didn’t lead them to reconsider. It led them to justify. Every workplace has its own version: the project nobody will cancel, the hire nobody will admit was a mistake. Personal life has its versions too: the career path we stay on because we chose it, the habit we keep defending because quitting would mean admitting it never worked. What is being protected is rarely the money or the time. It is a story about competence, and without intellectual humility that story usually wins.
The Cost of Defensiveness in Leadership
At work, the cost spreads quickly. Edmondson (1999) studied 51 work teams in a manufacturing company and found that teams whose members felt it was safe to take interpersonal risks, such as asking questions, raising concerns and admitting mistakes, engaged in more learning behaviour, which in turn was linked to better performance. Team leaders played a central role in creating that sense of safety. When the most senior person in the room says “I misjudged that, let’s look again”, they can help create the psychological safety that allows others to do the same. Intellectual humility in leadership can support this environment, making it easier for teams to question decisions rather than defend them. When it is missing, problems are not avoided. They simply go underground until they are too large to hide.
And this silence has consequences. Detert and Burris (2007) studied employees and managers in a large restaurant chain and found that when managers were perceived as genuinely open to employees’ ideas and suggestions, employees were more likely to speak up about problems and improvements. An important factor was whether people felt safe raising concerns with that particular manager. Employees are constantly reading their leader for signals about whether honesty is welcome. A manager who argues with every challenge, explains away every piece of bad news or treats disagreement as disloyalty teaches the team, without saying a word, that it is safer to stay quiet. Over time, that leader may hear less and less of what is actually happening, making decisions on an increasingly incomplete picture of reality. The defensiveness that was meant to protect their authority ends up weakening their judgement.
Intellectual Humility in Relationships and Personal Growth
At home, the same defensiveness shows up most clearly in arguments with the people closest to us. Most of us know the feeling of defending our version of events long after we have stopped being sure of it, simply because giving ground feels like losing. A study of 74 couples examined exactly this (Jongman-Sereno et al., 2025). Both partners reported their intellectual humility, relationship satisfaction, how often they argued, and their behaviour and perceptions during disagreements. Higher intellectual humility was associated with more constructive conflict experiences and greater relationship satisfaction, although the findings differed between men and women. Interestingly, it was also linked to how people interpreted their partner’s intentions, not just how they described their own behaviour. Being open to the possibility that you are wrong doesn’t necessarily end disagreements, but it may change how you experience them and respond to the person you love.
Being wrong also matters for how we see ourselves. Many of us carry beliefs such as “I’m not a numbers person”, “I’m bad at conflict” or “I’m just not creative”, conclusions drawn from a handful of early experiences and never revisited. Porter and Schumann (2018) found that people higher in intellectual humility were more willing to learn about views opposed to their own and showed more respect for people who disagreed with them. Importantly, when participants read that intelligence can be developed rather than fixed, they showed more intellectual humility during disagreements. Believing you can grow may make being wrong feel less like a verdict and more like information. From a cognitive behavioural point of view, beliefs about ourselves are best treated as working hypotheses, and applying the same openness inward is often where real personal development begins.
How to Practise Intellectual Humility
Becoming better at being wrong is a skill, which means it can be practised. Start with language: saying “my current view is” rather than “the answer is” leaves room to update without losing face, whether in a board meeting or a disagreement over dinner. Before an important decision, decide in advance what evidence would change your mind, so you recognise it when it arrives instead of explaining it away. When you get something wrong, acknowledge it specifically, take responsibility and explain what you will do differently. An apology should address the harm, not become another exercise in self-defence. Notice the physical signals of defensiveness, the rising heat and the urge to interrupt, and treat them as a cue to slow down. And before a difficult conversation, remind yourself of what you value about yourself, so admitting a mistake feels less like losing.
Being wrong is not the opposite of good leadership or a good life. Staying wrong is. The leaders, partners and individuals who grow are not the ones who never make mistakes, but the ones who notice them early, name them honestly and adjust without drama. Intellectual humility is uncomfortable, and few people volunteer to practise it. That is exactly why it sets people apart, at work and at home, and why intellectual humility is worth choosing deliberately, one revised opinion at a time.
Changing your mind is a skill, and like any skill, it grows faster with the right guidance. Whether you are leading a team or working on yourself, Reborn Mind & Growth Hub can help. Book a consultation at rebornhub.ae.
References
Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999
Leary, M. R., Diebels, K. J., Davisson, E. K., Jongman-Sereno, K. P., Isherwood, J. C., Raimi, K. T., Deffler, S. A., & Hoyle, R. H. (2017). Cognitive and interpersonal features of intellectual humility. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 43(6), 793–813. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167217697695
Porter, T., & Schumann, K. (2018). Intellectual humility and openness to the opposing view. Self and Identity, 17(2), 139–162. https://doi.org/10.1080/15298868.2017.1361861
Schumann, K. (2014). An affirmed self and a better apology: The effect of self-affirmation on transgressors’ responses to victims. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 54, 89–96. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2014.04.013
Staw, B. M. (1976). Knee-deep in the big muddy: A study of escalating commitment to a chosen course of action. Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 16(1), 27–44. https://doi.org/10.1016/0030-5073(76)90005-2
Leave a Reply