Intellectual humility has attracted attention in both philosophy and psychology. Philosophers have clarified the nature of intellectual humility as an epistemic virtue; and psychologists have developed scales for measuring people’s intellectual humility. Much less attention has been paid to the potential effects of intellectual humility on people’s negative attitudes and to its relationship with prejudice-based epistemic vices. Here we fill these gaps by focusing on the relationship between intellectual humility and prejudice. To clarify this relationship, we conducted four empirical studies. The results of these studies show three things. First, people are systematically prejudiced towards members of groups perceived as dissimilar. Second, intellectual humility weakens the association between perceived dissimilarity and prejudice. Third, more intellectual humility is associated with more prejudice overall. We show that this apparently paradoxical pattern of results is consistent with the idea that it is both psychologically and rationally plausible that one person is at the same time intellectually humble, epistemically virtuous and strongly prejudiced.

智力上的谦卑在哲学和心理学上都引起了人们的关注。哲学家已经阐明了谦卑的知识本质是一种认知美德。心理学家已经开发出衡量人们智力谦逊的量表。知识谦卑对人们的消极态度的潜在影响及其与基于偏见的认知恶习之间的关系的关注已很少。在这里，我们通过关注智力谦卑与偏见之间的关系来填补这些空白。为了阐明这种关系，我们进行了四项实证研究。这些研究的结果表明了三件事。首先，人们被系统地偏向被视为异类的群体成员。其次，智力上的谦卑削弱了感知的相似性与偏见之间的联系。第三，总体上有更多的偏见。我们表明，这种明显的自相矛盾的结果模式与这样的想法是一致的，即一个人在智力上谦虚，认识论上的贤惠和强烈的偏见在心理上和理性上都是合理的。