Associate professor of Pediatrics Dr. Anupma Wadhwa and bioethics expert Josephine Johnston discuss how excellent doctors are also humble, how patients respond to clinicians who cultivate humility, and more.

Transcript

Sara Ivry: Hi, everybody, I’m Sara Ivry, features editor at JSTOR Daily. On our web site, which is daily.jstor.org, we’ve now got a special podcast series up for you about the idea of intellectual humility. Broadly defined, that means an openness to being wrong. And we’re delighted to bring you, in this installment, a conversation between Doctor Anupma Wadhwa and Josephine Johnston. Doctor Wadhwa is an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Toronto, and she’s a staff physician in the Division of Infectious Diseases at the hospital for Sick Children. Josephine Johnston lectures on medical law and bioethics at the University of Otago in New Zealand. They’re talking about the value of introducing intellectual humility into the doctor patient relationship. I hope you enjoy their conversation. 

Josephine Johnston: Maybe we can actually start with the study that you published in 2022 with Sanjay Mahant. The title of the study is “Humility in Medical Practice, a qualitative study of peer-nominated, excellent physicians.” So there’s a little bit built into the title, but maybe you can just say in your own words like what that study was. How did you–how did you do it and what did you how did you sort of come to the humility theme?

Anupma Wadhwa: You know, it’s interesting. It actually probably started more than a decade before this paper was published. There was a study number one that came before this study, and that one was really, I was just junior on staff, so just finished my training and was talking to the coauthor about these excellent clinicians that we see around us, and what is it about them that makes them so great? They’re like the real outliers that we see at work every day. Well, you know, why don’t we do a study where we talk to them and try to sort that out a bit? And so we essentially had a group within our hospital to nominate “Who would you say is the excellent clinician, the person you would want your family member to see?” And from those nominations, we interviewed people. The idea was to sort of explore from them, “What do you think makes an excellent doctor?” And we never asked about humility specifically, but that’s essentially what emerged time and time again from the people we interviewed. And so that paper came out, and we sort of talked about all the different things that came out in the study, but we kept going back to the fact that whenever we presented the results of that study, study number one, what really sat with people and people remembered after we finished our presentation was the part about humility. And interesting to us, we didn’t find too much in the literature that went any deeper about humility in medicine. So we thought maybe what we should do is go back to that original data and reanalyze it and go a little deeper to really understand: Is humility just about being nice or is it really what we found in the study, which was a real central driver that seems to influence so much of their other practices in daily life, and to understand how that driver works. And that was sort of what the second study did for us. It helped us go deeper into understanding how humility worked in their everyday practice.

Johnston: I was really struck by one of the quotes that you begin with in the study, where you quote one of your participants as saying that humility is the inner morality of medicine, which just is a really interesting way of framing the virtue of humility, or that the attribute of humility that it’s, it’s really a moral issue as well as just sort of being a temperament or a way of behaving. It would be good to just talk maybe a little bit more about what you specifically found, because it seemed like your participants gave you quite a rich reflection on what humility meant to them and how humility was kind of manifested.

Wadhwa: That was what surprised me, actually, even with the first study. I didn’t realize how deeply these experienced, clearly respected clinicians thought about humility and how it played into so much of what they did. So maybe I’ll give some concrete examples. We sort of divided it into two big categories. One was how they saw themselves and the second big category is how they looked outside of themselves. So in terms of seeing themselves, the big piece of humility there was knowing your limitations and knowing when you don’t know. Not really being self denigrating in that process, but really with a confidence, and confidence was so important. It had to go hand in hand with being confident enough to know when you don’t know.

Johnston: Well, maybe we can just stop on that just for a second, because I think for some people humility and confidence might feel like they were opposite or in some kind of tension. So maybe you can say a little more about what how did you come across that interplay between confidence and humility, which might seem otherwise a bit counterintuitive?

Wadhwa: Yeah, that was probably one of the most surprising results from the study. For me, as a junior doc who was doing the study and learning it as I went along, and it basically came from the participants themselves directly quoting, saying that it’s not being meek, it’s being confident enough to know when you don’t know. It’s not the same thing as being humiliated, even though the words have some roots in the same place. And it is an interesting balance to walk between because you don’t want to be overconfident or arrogant, but you need to be confident enough to ask for help. It’s very interesting. To be very insecure you could also not be effective in what you’re doing all day. So they gave different examples in their interviews about where the confidence was important. So, having the confidence to say, ‘I think I made a mistake. Can I run this by you? And I can learn from it.’ That takes a confidence. The confidence to know when you don’t know when to ask for help, or the confidence to go up and have your work reviewed by somebody else to learn and get better. So also their inward look was knowing that they have limits and also understanding that medical knowledge has limitations. And I feel like those lessons I learned from those interviews I took with me during the last few years of the pandemic, because it was real life concentrated limitations and knowledge on a daily basis and changing our thought of what’s true or not true on a daily basis. But they talked about that in the early, earlier study as well. And then looking outwardly, that part of the study, those findings were valuing other people, and knowing your piece is one piece in this larger structure, understanding and valuing the larger structure in which we work, the other people, including the patients and other health care team members in their knowledge and what they bring.

Johnston: So you can kind of see there that interplay between that internal characteristic of understanding your own limits and understanding that medicine has limits and that medicine doesn’t know everything yet. That kind of internal activity and this external behavior, which is like therefore you seek second opinions, therefore you consult with other people. Therefore you understand that you ask the patient about their own experience of their own self, since they’re probably an expert in themselves. So it seems like this like I liked in your study, how you could sort of see how the internal attributes and the external behaviors were linked, and that both of them kind of were needed for humility, Like it’s one thing to feel understand your own limits, but if you don’t act on that in any way, you’re not really humble, you’re not really exhibiting humility because you’re not doing the activities that would sort of or doing the behaviors that are really characteristic of the attribute.

Wadhwa: There are some other things that came up as well where having the humility and recognizing the gaps in your knowledge would then drive you to have curiosity to fill those gaps. So that should drive you to have a lifelong learning approach. Having the humility and valuing other people’s perspectives improved your patient communication skills is kind of how you brought up those examples and your teamwork skills.

Johnston: You know, when I read your paper, I also then was reminded of some work from a newish now pulmonary critical care physician that I had the privilege of working with ten or fifteen years ago, when she was just a research assistant at the Hastings Center. And her name’s Coleen Farrell, and she’s written a couple of really great pieces, including one in JAMA Internal Medicine from 2019, essays about being a young or a med student and then a young physician and managing depression in oneself. And she was sort of reflecting on how, at least as a medical student, she kind of felt like medical training was encouraging her and all of her colleagues, you know, young people, training to be doctors, to deny their own pain and suffering. And that actually that kind of attitude of like, you have to be strong, you have to know everything, you have to be confident, all that kind of stuff, that in turn limited their ability to understand suffering in their patients, and that when she reflected on her own experience of managing depression, it forced her to say that she too can suffer and need care and learned then that in some ways she was not fundamentally different from her patients. To me, that also kind of codes along the same lines of the humility that you were discussing and learned through better a kind of difficult experience of having illness oneself. Did anyone talk about that kind of thing in your in your work?

Wadhwa: That is so fascinating and so true. No, it didn’t come up in the interviews, but it may have been because we didn’t probe that specifically. However, looking at doing the literature review and going back to the literature after seeing the results of the study, there will be quotes, you know, dating back to Osler, talking about how, you know, he would put N.G. tubes down himself to know what it feels like to have a tube placed down. And that helped him become a better doctor, or where one of his students, Dr. Cushing, also kind of very well renowned, sort of famous doctor from yesteryear, also had his own medical issues, and how that changed him and how he understood the patient’s perspective better. And I wonder if that’s something because I was a fresh doctor out of med school, hadn’t yet, you know, for whatever reasons, much experience being on the patient side of life. And so I wonder if some of the doctors who we had interviewed had been on staff longer, had more life, different life experiences. I can’t help but wonder if their own experiences as patients along the way also has informed how they work. Now, I know since then my experiences on the patient side of things has completely affected how I practice care. So that’s that story is fascinating. And then I have to pull back that article to read.

Johnston: Are there things that you have seen done in medicine or in medical training that you think cultivate humility. Because I can imagine, you know, like just standing there, obviously standing there and telling medical students that they need to cultivate humility wouldn’t get very far. But I can think of some things and you probably can too, like that actually seem to have the effect of cultivating humility and the kind of effective strategies.

Wadhwa: It’s such a great question. So, can humility be taught? And I mean, I’d love to hear what you think about that as well. I’ll just give you my reflections on that. I do think in terms of a one-to-one teaching, learning experience with a role model or a mentor, where that role model is sharing their views of their gaps in knowledge with the trainee or the student—that could help the student understand that, oh, this is something of use. I can see it in play, and it is something valued. That’s one way that it could be cultivated. For a culture or an organization to value humility—that’s interesting. Maybe now rethinking how we approach morbidity and mortality rounds, where we sit and talk about potential errors in medical practice and how we could improve moving in the future, I think that takes time. But changing the culture in those rounds towards an openness and not so much an evaluation of who did what wrong when, but more of an openness that this happens. let’s understand how and why it happened and how do we improve it. That can also help move it—the humility—maybe teach it through the environment that the learners are in.

Johnston: That makes me think about these. You know, when people talk about some things that—sometimes I think, “Oh, that doesn’t sound super interesting,” but actually, you know, quality and safety actually that—like what you’re saying, the culture around quality and safety and what kinds of attitudes and discussions happen and what language is used to talk about mistakes or to talk about negative outcomes can be part of that culture that allows humility to kind of exist and be exhibited and modeled by senior physicians.

I was thinking about a couple of things that I’ve seen at our medical school that I think probably—I don’t know that they’re framed with the language of humility, but they really resonate with what I read in your study—and one of them is that we do have a program of interprofessional education. So our medical students have opportunities—well, I shouldn’t put it even like that—medical students, nursing students, dental, pharmacy, physio—I’m probably forgetting something else (physio being physical therapy)—those different health sciences students in our system here, they all have opportunities throughout their training to meet and do work and tutorials together, and the idea being that they will ultimately be working in teams and need to be communicating across professional lines. You know, doctors need to communicate with people’s primary care physicians. Dentists, sorry, need to communicate with primary care physicians, doctors need to communicate with nurses and vice versa. Pharmacists are in the petrol all the time. So that’s part of the training is that there are these learning sessions that are interprofessional and I feel like that might go some way, especially in that kind of stereotype of what clinical medicine is like. We as doctors are supposed to know everything, but as you noted in your study, actually being open to the input and, and expertise of others on the team is a core part of what makes for excellence in clinicians. And so I was thinking that interprofessional education might be a component of it.

Wadhwa: Yeah, I think that’s a great example of where they can see humility in practice. It’s making me think of even in, like, in our training program after clinic, there’s an after-clinic meeting where it’s interprofessional and everybody’s input is welcomed and discussed and how sometimes that can go wrong. And we sort of talk about this concept of the hidden curriculum where some people might roll their eyes once the certain other team member starts talking or, you know, things that are unintentional but are giving maybe a negative learning, like it’s suggesting a value that, oh, I don’t really value what this person is saying and therefore what they say is not valued versus what, and you don’t want the opposite to happen. These are wonderful ideas and opportunities to teach humility. But I also am wondering how—I’m sure there’s there are ways where it could be done well, but also be aware if you’re unintentionally giving negative impressions to people.

Johnston: Well, one of the strategies, I think, to kind of address what you’re saying, what you were characterizing as the hidden curriculum. You know, that those parts of the curriculum that aren’t written down, but that we all kind of know get conveyed. And certainly that there is that stereotype of like doctors not really caring what or not listening to nurses or not really listening to other people on the team. And I do think that part of the interprofessional education strategy in the University of Otago’s medical school is to start from the first year of medical school having interprofessional education so that hopefully getting to people before they’ve learned—so-called “learned”—these kinds of ideas about how the hierarchy of knowledge and the hierarchy of kind of clinical expertise in the hospital setting, and that’s at least it’s a strategy. I’m sure it’s not by itself enough.

The other thing that I was thinking about that I’ve noticed here in New Zealand especially, and I think it’s true, you know, in many, many health care systems now, is that over the last sort of fifty to seventy-five years, there’s just been a much greater emphasis put on listening to patients, involving patients in decision-making in medical settings, and respecting them. And that started way back with, you know, law cases and general kind of changes from a paternalistic “doctor knows best”—patients maybe don’t even get told the truth about what’s going on with them—we’ve really shifted a lot and, you know, in less than a hundred-year period over to a situation where most people would not consider, you know, lying to patients. There’s a huge emphasis on respecting patients, informing them of what’s happening, being truthful, being quite full in your disclosures to them about what’s going on and about risks and then, you know, involving them in their own care and in their own decision making to the point where I think you could now say that it’s not good medical practice to ignore patients or to not talk directly with them or to not involve them in their own decision making. That’s no longer good medical practice. Good medical practice, includes that kind of patient engagement and patient discussion, and I feel like one of the things that, you know, you found was that how clinicians interact with patients in valuing the patient’s knowledge in the patient’s perspective was a part of humility. And I think we teach that very directly now. It’s even required by law, I would say, in some senses. So that seems like a big shift in what we teach clinicians.

Wadhwa: Yeah, and I think that that’s a great example and a wonderful, a wonderful change, I hope, and a sustainable one that’ll continue and grow. It’s interesting because sort of bringing in patients’ perspective, and I was just thinking how I’ve talked to patients often where I’ll say, “Okay, this is a two-way street.” You know, “I’ll explain to you what I know, but it really helps me to understand what you know as well, because we can learn together.” And I actually find that helps in the patient relationship and patient outcomes to follow. So I think there’s like beyond being the right thing to do or the nice thing to do, I think once that’s implemented, if then trainees can also see or doctors can see how that builds their therapeutic relationship with their patients and improves patient outcome at the end because you’re coming to a shared understanding and you’re more likely to understand what they’re willing to do or not do and why, and they’re more likely to follow a plan that you’ve come up with together, that that can also improve patient outcomes. It sort of turns into a nice positive cycle or a win-win, which is, I guess, my optimistic view.

Johnston: Well, it’s better medicine when it’s done with that kind of back and forth. And I think that’s, you know, something like humility can sound very abstract, but actually those kinds of engagements with patients are very practical and very concrete. And, you know, it’s, as you found, are like core components of what it means to actually act with humility or to practice medicine with humility.

Wadhwa: And you know what’s so interesting, it reminds me now of the initial question, or one of the earlier questions you asked today, about the one of the quotes, which was humility is the central morality of our practice, something like that—it was a quote like that, where at the time when we did the study, we were frustrated, maybe, with medical education and the direction it had taken or was taking because it was very much focused on competency based medicine and observable things that your trainee can do and check you checking off that, yes, they can do it, and looking at some of these national competency frameworks. So in Canada, it’s CanMEDS, and the US has their ACGME competencies, but it didn’t include anything about humility there. Possibly we were getting the vibe, is it because it’s sort of felt as a soft thing? It’s you can’t really—it’s not concrete enough, so why would we talk about humility? We’re going to talk about communication skills. We’re going to talk about medical knowledge. We’re going to talk about leadership skills, you know, more concrete things. But it’s interesting to see, at least in Canada, they’re relooking at our main competency framework for medical education and with the possible addition of humility as a separate competency. So that’ll be very exciting to see if it gets integrated at that level of expectation and then trickles down into all the training programs, implementing it in real life situations like the ones you’ve brought up. I think that would be a great, ongoing shift in medical care.

Johnston: It’s so interesting, and I do feel, after reading your piece, more confident that here are actually, honestly quite specific internal characteristics of humility and external behaviors or external practices that show humility and make and cultivate it, maybe even including things like engaging in shared decision making with patients, which as a way of, very concretely saying, “I think you know things and I think you are you are important, and I think we should make this decision together,” rather than “I’m going to tell you what to do.”

Wadhwa: Yes. And, you know, I think another piece like post-pandemic or I shouldn’t say post-pandemic because the pandemic is ongoing, but post-heavy lockdowns era that we’ve kind of all been through a lot of uncertainty and health care provider professional burnout as well—incorporating humility can also be a mechanism to work on burnout, with the humility and acceptance that medicine is not a 100 percent black-and-white, yes-no answer. It can continue to evolve and change. It can bring you to an acceptance that maybe you can handle that tension of not knowing a bit better, or at least be accepting that it’s not you. It’s actually what’s happening. It’s just the world, that science changes and evolves as we get a better understanding of things or as the environment changes.

Johnston: That burnout point seems really important, that sort of holding oneself as a clinician to a kind of fake standard of perfection and ultimate knowledge when really just understanding that there are limits and understanding that, you know, knowledge is still being accumulated, we are still learning that that can actually help people to manage, you know, the hard work of clinical medicine and hopefully of preserving their own mental health and their own commitment to that seems, again, very concrete and very practical application of this understanding.

Wadhwa: Oh, yeah, absolutely. That’s a wonderful example. And another one, even with humility and how that ties into compassion, because you have an outward focus, so you’re looking at the patient’s experience, trying to understand how they feel, and then cultivating compassion can then help you focus on, ultimately, caring about that patient’s suffering and if you have a role in alleviating that in one way or another, you’re a piece of the team’s effort to do that can bring you work satisfaction as well. So sort of humility linking to compassion, linking to work satisfaction, helping with burnout. So I can sort of see multiple mechanisms, or the far reaches of where a nice oiled engine of humility can help you with your work.

I might add, there was a really interesting point there about medicine now and the era of the Internet, and how if patients can go online and read about their condition and bring that knowledge with them to the appointment—and it certainly can be, especially with chronic illness, the patient is often more an expert on that illness than the physician because they’re living with it every day and reading about, whereas the physician might be doing multiple other conditions—and having the intellectual humility, it can actually turn into a learning moment, if a patient brings like some knowledge that they’ve got from the Internet to an appointment or from whatever their own research is. Typically, it’s on the World Wide Web now, but it’s interesting because I also feel like that can mean intellectual humility on both sides, too, I guess. So from the patient’s perspective, also to say, okay, now that I’ve looked at this data, but I can look to the physician, maybe not so much as the all-knower who’s going to give me the right wrong answer, but maybe someone who with confidence can walk me through a lot of uncertainty with their confidence and their experience seeing this condition in other patients. So that tension of having humility, whereas we thought of the physicians should be the all-knower, I think it can shift, but still have a really important role in that a doctor-patient relationship and with the ultimate goal, which is to improve a patient outcome or patient’s suffering or their quality of life.

Johnston: Yeah, I mean, people do hope from there. I think many patients, and there is research on this, find uncertainty very difficult, like worse sometimes then a bad so-called bad result or bad, you know, for a test, let’s say that, you know, you get a negative test result and maybe it’s bad news, but boy is it hard to handle when it’s uncertain news. And yet, as we were just saying, uncertainty is everywhere. And it’s a core part of what of the truth of medicine. That there is often a bit of uncertainty. But as you’re saying in having a clinician who can guide you through that uncertainty and sort of show, you know, actually this, we do understand very well. But here’s the gap where we have a little clear lack of clarity, or here is where your own individual experience is probably going to fill in some of the holes for us. So, like, just being able to have somebody who can guide you through the uncertainty and help you recognize where there actually is—because for a lot of things, we do have a lot of knowledge, and we can be very, you know, sure and clear and then just kind of really sort of zeroing in on those bits where everybody is uncertain and then how to manage that uncertainty. I just know from other research I’ve read that uncertainty is this quite difficult state and that clinicians can help with.

Wadhwa: Yeah, that is fascinating. And I’ll chat with patients about that, too, saying, did you get on the Internet last night? Was it really scary? Like and I know I’ve been there, I’ve done that with my own family and health issues where you just you’re so stressed, you want to get on the Internet and try to find some certainty. But often that can be even more scary because you’re not sure how to interpret that, what you’re reading in relation to your specific case. And then I’ll say, Well, that’s my role. And I’m now here to talk to you about what–-how all of this relates to you. So if it helps, you can stop checking Internet and talk to me or bring to me what you’ve seen so I can help you sift through that for you and see how it’s relevant to you. The doctors of the future, that there’s so many neat, neat skills that we’re going to have to keep learning as we go.

Johnston: Because I feel like it wasn’t that long ago that doctors were like, don’t look at the Internet. And it’s like, that is just not realistic. Better to say, you know, did you go on the Internet? You probably did. Let’s talk about it.

Wadhwa: Yeah. I’ll tell my students, I say, “Go and Google this condition and see what the first three hits are. And then you’re going to know what your patient is most worried about when they come in the room. And then you can address it right on. Build some trust and keep going.” It’s just lots of lots of positives to the good old Internet for sure.

Johnston: So we’re very optimistic, I know you and I, that humility has practical manifestations and it can be part of training. But what do you think might be some barriers to an intellectual humility or humility and, and medicine? Because it’s not maybe it’s not maybe a profession that’s famous for its humility. So what do you think? What do you think can be barriers?

Wadhwa: Yeah, it’s such a good point. It certainly is, in day-to-day practice, often the person who sounds most confident or most sure of themselves is the person who sounds most correct, but it’s not always the case. They might just sound most confident, but they might not be most knowledgeable or most correct. But that is something in your day-to-day work environment that you’re dealing with at all times. So if you come across as overly open about how little you know about something, there’s always that risk that it looks like, “Oh, they don’t know anything. But this person sounds confident. They always know the right answer. Let’s do what they say.” So I think that’s a normal human nature aspect. So I think that barrier, again, I’m optimistic, so I’m turning it on. But a way to maybe manage that barrier is to practice and find that fine line of humility and confidence together and knowing what you bring, knowing what you say has value, but also realizing that you don’t have to pretend you know something when you don’t know. But I do see that as a barrier, I think on every day, if we did like a study where we just went into a room where people are discussing a challenging issue and the trainees are listening in, they will say, “Oh, the smartest doctor in the room was the one who sounded most confident,” but they may not necessarily be the doctor with the most humility in the room. So I think that is a challenge or a barrier about embracing humility.

Johnston: I mean, to me that one of the sort of reassuring things or one of the aspects of that is that medicine is on some level a bit of an apprenticeship. And so you were talking earlier about modeling the kind of things that medical students and training doctors see in more senior clinicians. And that also connects with the conversation we had about earlier about the hidden curriculum. So the hidden curriculum being, like, not what’s the official curriculum but what gets kind of taught on the down low or what you learn by just observing what actually happens in medical practice, and sometimes the hidden curriculum, at least from the perspective of medical educators, has been really deeply problematic, because it’s like there’ll be something taught and then there’ll be this other message that is in the exact opposite direction that kind of people just pick up on. And one of those might be, one of those hidden curriculum messages might be, that you’ve got to sound like you’re sure or you’ve got to project a kind of false confidence in your knowledge. And I know that, you know, medical students do feel really kind of frightened that they won’t know something, and they might get asked bedside by the clinician, you know, what about this? What about that? And they sort of in front of their peers, in front of the patient, who’s scanning in their heads, trying to remember that thing whatever it might be. And so I do know that that sense of kind of not knowing is really frightening and can be the kind of thing that even if we tell them as their educators, you know, everybody has things they don’t know. Medicine is finite. You know, there’s infinite knowledge out there, and we haven’t got all of it yet but actually what they observe is that what’s rewarded is being really, really sure. And so I do think that kind of that kind of probably is a barrier. But like you’re saying, if you have senior clinicians who are modeling whether it’s in their grand rounds lectures or whether it’s in the bedside consultations or whether it’s in those I’m sorry, going to lose the way—is it morbidity discussions?

Wadhwa: Oh yes. The mortality and morbidity.

Johnston: Yes, mortality and morbidity discussions, which is when clinicians get together and talk to each other about a particular case and what happened and sort of try to learn from it. All of those are opportunities for that message about fake, kind of confidence to be kind of undone, I think.

Wadhwa: Yeah, it’s a great point. And the piece you brought up about what’s rewarded, that term I think is something we need to be cognizant—not that that’s that there’s some language given to intellectual humility or it’s maybe a little bit better understood now in medical circles, now that it’s labeled—we can now with that knowledge, think about our work environment and be more aware of what is being rewarded, and are we giving the wrong message by what we’re rewarding? Like are we giving rewards for individual achievement versus team achievement? Are we giving, you know, rewarding people for confident way of speaking versus humility, an approach to their medicine with humility.

Johnston: So Anu, I’ve just found this such a rewarding and interesting conversation, and I really just want to thank you for the conversation today, but also for the work and the research that you have done to bring this topic of humility, you know, much more into medicine and into medical training. I think it’s really important.

Wadhwa: Well, thank you so much, Josephine. I thoroughly enjoyed talking to you and learning from you as well. I learned a lot. Thanks. Thanks so much.

Ivry: That was Dr. Anupma Wadhwa and Josephine Johnston. We’ve got other equally riveting conversations about intellectual humility, what it is, and how it might be applied on our website, daily.jstor.org. We’ve also got a reading list about intellectual humility. We hope you’ll check it all out and share it. I’m Sara Ivry, the features editor at JSTOR Daily. This conversation was produced by Julie Subrin with help from JSTOR Daily’s Cathy Halley and from me.

Funding for this project was provided by UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center as part of its Expanding Awareness of the Science of Intellectual Humility initiative, which is supported by the John Templeton Foundation. Thank you so much for listening.

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