Intellectual virtues are the qualities and character strengths that enable good thinking and learning. Intellectual virtues are dispositions to think and act in ways that promote true belief, knowledge, and understanding. Accessible to everyone, intellectual virtues are distinct from, but can enhance, cognitive ability and access to information. For more information about intellectual virtues, see Educating for Intellectual Virtues.
The Open Inquiry Toolkit focuses on a core set of intellectual virtues:
- Curiosity: the capacity to observe, ponder, and inquire, characterized by a propensity for wonderment about the world and a desire to understand it by being attentive and asking questions.
- Open-mindedness: an encompassing motivation to see things as they are, characterized by the willingness to challenge an existing belief in the pursuit of knowledge and understanding through due regard for evidence and reasoning.
- Intellectual humility: a willingness to acknowledge the limitations and imperfections of one’s own knowledge and to identify and admit what one doesn’t know.
- Intellectual tenacity: the capacity to withstand intellectual challenges while maintaining intellectual carefulness, thoroughness, and diligence, characterized by the willingness to exert effort in thinking, reasoning, and learning.
- Intellectual autonomy: the exercise of intellectual agency in inquiring and gathering, attending to, evaluating, and synthesizing evidence and reasoning in the pursuit of knowledge and understanding exemplified by independent thinking.
- Epistemic responsibility: an appreciation for the epistemic interdependence of all thinkers and the necessity of epistemic community characterized by an embrace of intellectual pluralism and the civil exchange of ideas and information.
The intentional practice of intellectual virtues is intended to mitigate cognitive biases—distortions in thinking and information seeking that are intrinsic to the human condition. The specific cognitive biases that the Open Inquiry Toolkit addresses are:
- Confirmation bias: the tendency to notice and give greater attention and credence to information that affirms one’s existing beliefs. Curiosity can mitigate confirmation bias.
- Cognitive dissonance: the tendency to engage in motivated reasoning and avoid information that challenges one’s existing beliefs and attitudes, or otherwise makes one uncomfortable. Open-mindedness can mitigate cognitive dissonance.
- The Certainty Trap: “a resolute unwillingness to consider the possibility that we might not be right or might not be right in the way that we think we are” (Redstone 2022). Intellectual humility can help one avoid the Certainty Trap.
- Mere exposure effect: a tendency to prefer the familiar. In information-seeking, intellectual tenacity can mitigate the mere exposure effect.
- Conformity: the tendency to adopt or espouse attitudes and beliefs according to group norms. Intellectual autonomy can mitigate the tendency for conformity.
- In-group bias: the tendency to prefer members of one’s in-group relative to one’s out-group that can contribute to polarization and tribalism. Epistemic responsibility can mitigate in-group bias.
We also map these target cognitive biases and intellectual virtues to the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education. Please visit our annotated bibliography for more details about the scholarship that grounds the Open Inquiry Toolkit.
