Facilitating and Hindering Accurate Perceptions of Argument Strength: The Effects of Intergroup Bias and Intellectual Humility

Intellectual humility (IH), the awareness that one’s beliefs could be wrong, is lacking in U.S. political discourse. Guided by the elaboration likelihood model, we conducted an experiment (N = 308) examining people’s ability to differentiate objectively strong (versus weak) political arguments. We explore whether IH influences the effects of in-/outgroup sources on perceived argument strength. Results revealed people high in IH were better able to differentiate strong from weak arguments (nonsignificant with covariates in the model (p =.07), but significant without covariates). Additionally, participants evaluated ingroup messages as stronger than outgroup messages, an effect not moderated by IH.