The intellectually humble professor: university students’ perceptions of professors who engage in wrongness admission
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Publicly engaging in wrongness admission – a behavioral manifestation of intellectual humility – is effectively admitting one’s incompetence, potentially leading people to avoid these behaviors. However, engaging in wrongness admission fosters reputational benefits (e.g. greater perceived communion and competence). Yet, it is not clear if this is true for wrongness admissions from university professors, for whom perceived competence is of the utmost importance. Therefore, in one correlational study (N = 267) and two experiments (N = 378), we tested whether professors’ wrongness admission promotes positive perceptions from students. Professors viewed as more willing to engage in wrongness admission were rated higher in communion and competence as well as effectiveness as an instructor and potential as a research mentor. Moreover, professors who engaged in wrongness admission (vs. refused) in a fabricated scenario received higher reputation, professor effectiveness, and communion ratings. These findings hold social and pedagogical implications for intellectual humility among university professors.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".