Cultivating epistemic humility in research teams

By Faye Miller.

What makes it so challenging for research teams to be truly receptive to being wrong? And what can teams do to make doubt expressible and useful?

Being aware that knowledge is always situational, incomplete, and prone to error, as well as the willingness to hold opinions tentatively, be receptive to change, and recognise the boundaries of understanding, are all components of epistemic humility. Humility about what one knows and can know is an intellectual quality in individual researchers. Yet epistemic humility also has a structural dimension: which doubts get expressed, whose knowledge is heard, and how teams handle what they don’t yet know, are challenges that go beyond the individual researcher to shape how research teams function.

This i2Insights contribution is an attempt to highlight two challenges that need to be addressed:

• the confidence trap, built on the pressure to exude certainty, and
• the silence trap, arising from the social dynamics that can suppress productive doubt.

Neither represents a failure of individual character or commitment. Both are shaped by forces larger than the individual. The confidence trap shapes what crosses the boundary between teams and the outside world, while the silence trap shapes what can be expressed within teams.

The confidence trap

In the context of a research team, the confidence trap tends to mean only expressing conviction and keeping silent about areas of doubt. The trap functions through publication rules, funder expectations, and genre traditions that originate outside the team, ie., in journal conventions, institutional definitions of what counts as a finding, and the expectations of those who commission research. These are so embedded that they can be hard to recognise. Addressing the trap inside the team is necessary but not sufficient. The norms and expectations the team operates within shape what is possible, and deserve explicit attention, even when they are harder to change.

This is not an argument against confident communication and some simplification is necessary for that. When a team practises epistemic humility, they can be honest about which conclusions are still tentative and which are confident enough to act on the findings.

For example, one research team working on urban water policy introduced a two-column reporting format: one column for confident findings, and one for live questions, giving funders a clearer picture of where further investment would be most valuable, while preserving intellectual honesty.

The silence trap

In teams where individuals privately hold doubts, these doubts can go unvoiced. These dynamics can be self-sustaining. For example, early career researchers may find it costly to challenge a direction that senior colleagues have publicly committed to, and—for those senior colleagues—reputational investment can make it harder to stay open to complicating evidence. Close-knit teams can experience challenge as a threat to trust even when it is intellectually valuable. Cultural context shapes all of these. Those whose perspectives least fit within the dominant disciplinary framework, such as community partners, practitioners, and those from underrepresented research traditions, are often the first to hold back. Their quietness deserves attention, not assumption. Creating conditions for doubt means building practices that make it expressible across the full range of cultural and institutional positions in the room.

Some practical approaches to reduce the social cost of expressing doubt include:

• anonymising early-stage feedback,
• assigning a “critical friend” role within the group, with the specific task of voicing doubts, and rotating this role around the group, and
• creating space for concerns to be raised before group discussion occurs and then including the concerns in the discussion.

For example, one health research team tried closing meetings with every member submitting one anonymous question or concern via a shared form, with the lead researcher addressing these at the next meeting. Over time this seemed to normalise uncertainty as a shared resource, with several of the project’s most productive pivots coming from concerns that might otherwise never have been raised.

Identifying where the traps may be operating

At the start of a project or when making important decisions during a project, the following diagnostic questions might begin to help a team identify where the traps may be operating. Gathering answers from team members individually before sharing them with the group may produce more honest responses.

Confidence trap

• What three things are most uncertain in the direction the team is going?
  By identifying specific uncertainties instead of vague ones, it is more likely that the issues will be discussed openly and monitored as the project progresses.
• Has the team identified and recorded the specific conditions or evidence that would require its primary conclusion to be changed?
  This may help make clear what sort of evidence could contradict the main conclusion, identify any assumptions being made, and support a process of accountability as the research process continues.

Silence trap

• Who would find it hard to disagree openly, and how could they contribute safely?
  Naming the people who face the highest social or cultural cost for voicing doubt, and designing a channel for them, can be more useful than a general invitation to speak up.
• When was the last time someone changed the team’s direction? What allowed that to happen?
  This looks for evidence that expressed doubt is actually influencing decisions. If no one can answer these questions, that may be a signal worth paying attention to.

A note on artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence tools can contribute to both traps if used without care. They generate outputs that sound assured regardless of the evidence, feeding the confidence trap. They can also deepen the silence trap: when an artificial intelligence output exuding certainty enters a discussion early, it “anchors” group thinking, so that the social cost of departing from it is raised, compounding the pressures that already make doubt costly to voice. My previous i2Insights contribution, A framework for navigating the impact of using artificial intelligence on collaborative research communication, offers a five-stage framework for navigating how artificial intelligence affects collaborative communication. That framework works best in teams that have already built the habit of naming uncertainty and voicing doubt.

Conclusion

The practical approaches described above can help teams make epistemic humility a working practice. One thing teams that practice epistemic humility tend to have in common is that they see not knowing as a valuable contribution, not a sign of weakness. Doubt that is voiced safely can become a source of change, and uncertainty that is named early can become a resource.

What are your experiences with cultivating epistemic humility? Do you see the confidence and/or silence traps in your work? What other challenges to epistemic humility in teams might exist? What other kinds of practices or conditions might help your team feel free to express doubt and stay open? 

Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) Statement: Artificial intelligence was not used in the development of this i2Insights contribution or the work on which the contribution is based. (For i2Insights policy on artificial intelligence please see https://i2insights.org/contributing-to-i2insights/guidelines-for-authors/#artificial-intelligence.)

Biography: Faye Miller PhD is a research director, knowledge broker, and career educator. As Founder of Human Constellation Consulting, she collaborates globally with technology companies, universities, and research organisations on social and ethical aspects of science and technology, digital and information literacy, transdisciplinary knowledge integration and shared understanding, all of which are research areas in which she has published. She is currently based in Canberra, Australia.