Editor's Choice -- Ismaili Digest -- How your education affects your wisdom, judgement, open mindedness and humility ... and how to prevent it

We like to think education is the key to wisdom, judgement, foresight, objectivity, open mindedness and humility. But is this true? Research, assessing these intellectual virtues among educated, people suggests education actually undermines them.

In fact, in 2006, Mawlana Hazar Imam remarked that "too often, education made our students less flexible -- confident to the point of arrogance that they now had all the answers -- rather than more flexible, humble in their life-long openness to new questions and new responses."

With respect to humility and open mindedness, Harvard reported that after "arguing" for decades, researchers at Pepperdine University finally had a "breakthrough" when they "started playing with a concept from religion called 'intellectual humility.'" Imagine that! An idea as fundamental as intellectual humility was something scholars had never considered for decades and they learned of it from religion.

With respect to judgment, foresight and objectivity, Philip E. Tetlock, a professor at Berkeley, analysed 80,000 forecasts, made by 284 experts, over 20 years. His shocking finding: these highly educated experts were, by and large, horrific forecasters, no matter their specialty or years of experience. In fact, they did worse than dart-throwing monkeys.

But then, when confronted with their failure, many still never admitted their consistent flaws in judgment, just as Hazar Imam remarked in 1987, at McMaster University, when he noted that "professional standards and assumptions can provide a form of intolerance, pride and myopia as intractable as the rigidities of traditional societies." But why would this be?

Neuroscientist Tali Sharot explains in her best-selling book "The Influential Mind", picked as Best Book of 2017 by Forbes, The Times (UK), The Huffington Post, Bloomberg, Stanford Business School, and others. She found that "the greater your cognitive capacity, the greater your ability to rationalize and interpret information at will, and to creatively twist data to fit your opinions."

Education's negative impact on wisdom, judgement, objectivity and humility isn't limited to experts. It also shows up in everyday life, with everyday people. For example, surveys of Americans consistently show Republicans and Democrats judge their opponents as more extreme than they actually are. However, the surveys also show that not only were the Democrats' judgment was worse than Republicans', but their judgment got "much worse" the more education they had!

We all assume we are open minded, wise and humble, that we don't suffer from bias, but research reveals the more educated we are, the more our judgment, wisdom, open mindedness and humility suffer. However, research also reveals the simple solution: intellectual humility. Assume you are wrong and be open minded to other views.

Time and time again, Hazar Imam has reiterated the importance of open mindedness and intellectual humility. In 2007, at the Aga Khan Academy he said "The Academies' curriculum seeks to instil a habit of intellectual humility which constantly opens young minds to what it is that they do not know, and which sends them on a wide and rigorous search for new knowledge."

Intellectual humility and open mindedness are two sides of the same coin. One side permits you to be mistaken and the other helps you correct yourself. This is why the Pepperdine researchers connected the two, and got their breakthrough on open mindedness from religion's notion of intellectual humility.

As an Ismaili, why is all this important to you? Simply because we are searching for the truth -- about the world and our faith, as best as we can understand it. But finding truth is impossible without intellectual humility (as only Allah is perfect) and without being open minded to other points of view.

The articles below highlight all these findings and much more. Today, even within the Jamat, false stereotypes create harmful, divisive fractures. Open mindedness, and the intellectual humility that it requires, have never been more important to create unity, respect and the most important form of diversity: intellectual diversity.

Stay safe, and warm regards,
Ismaili Digest.