Georgia State Faculty Awarded $6 Million Grant for Intellectual Humility Research

ATLANTA—College of Education & Human Development Associate Professor Don Davis and colleagues received a $6 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation to better understand intellectual humility.

Intellectual humility is defined as “recognizing and owning our intellectual limitations in the service of pursuing deeper knowledge, truth and understanding,” according to the foundation’s website.

Davis is an active member of the college’s Ken Matheny Center for the Study of Stress, Trauma, and Resilience. He will work with other center faculty, including center co-director Kenneth Rice and affiliate faculty Cirleen DeBlaere, to coordinate three internal projects with other partner universities. This includes working with Hope College’s Daryl Van Tongeren, the University of Connecticut’s Heather Battaly and the University of North Texas’s Joshua Hook, the project’s co-principal investigators.

The project also involves distributing $3.5 million to support projects focused on two questions:

• What are the psychological processes that are responsible for developing intellectual humility?
• What contexts are intellectual humility interventions most beneficial?

The grant team will award funding to 5-6 early career research projects and 10-12 regular research projects, which will take place from 2023-2026.

“Popular writers have suggested that intellectual humility has implications for how society handles disagreement around contentious topics such as politics or religion. Yet more work is needed to translate basic research into approaches to help people develop and cultivate skills related to intellectual humility,” the grant team wrote. “This work is particularly critical in domains where commitment to a specific belief system or set of values is high, such as in religion, politics, culture, leadership and education.”

For more information about the John Templeton Foundation, visit https://www.templeton.org.