3 Recovering Humility and Softening Conviction

The US cultural emphasis on competition is deeply intertwined with our craving for conviction, especially in our leaders. We gravitate toward leaders who are highly assertive, who express no doubts about their actions, and who are “fighters.” We reward forceful management and quick problem resolution. We favor intellectual simplification and clarity. Although we know the dangers of overconfidence, we emphasize building internal scripts that reinforce confidence rather than assessing carefully the limits of our knowledge. Such conviction habits reflect the assumption that we typically know enough based on the past to decide how to proceed. But as we move toward release in complex interconnected global systems, inductive reasoning based on experience during growth and conservation phases of the adaptive cycle becomes less reliable. In this chapter, we examine the underdeveloped skillful habits of humility, and we explore how humility and softened forms of conviction can be integrated so we can flourish now.

Consider a puzzle that reveals internal tensions in our views about conviction and humility. Politicians are often criticized for being “flip-floppers”—that is, for changing their minds. For example, when John Kerry was a presidential candidate in 2004, he was effectively ridiculed for being a flip-flopper because he appeared to have changed his mind about supporting the war in Iraq. President George H. W. Bush was similarly criticized when he changed his position against raising taxes. To many, these examples suggested lack of conviction. At the same time, scientists are praised for changing their minds when new evidence supports an alternative view. Albert Einstein believed in an eternal universe and rejected the early theories regarding a “big bang.” Yet when Edwin Hubble established that galaxies were rapidly moving away from each other, Einstein changed his view well before the Big Bang became commonly accepted. Did he flip-flop? We do not criticize scientists for changing their minds based on new evidence; indeed, this change reveals the virtue of humility. Why should our leaders be praised for their convictions and scientists for their humility? And can these two positions be reconciled, or are our social norms regarding conviction and humility hopelessly inconsistent?

One possible explanation of this puzzle is that we want to see conviction about moral views, and we praise humility about empirical matters. On such a view, our leaders’ actions should be based on their moral commitments, and scientists should be responsive to changes in empirical evidence. But this simple explanation is not adequate. We do admire steadfastness regarding some moral matters, and especially about moral character traits, but such steadfastness rarely dictates political actions. Whether we should support a war, raise taxes, or promote renewable energy depends a great deal on the specific empirical evidence for these policies. Politicians may base their general views on broad moral principles, but as they apply these in specific context by advocating for policies, they must depend on the kind of evidence that scientists use. Thus, as the evidence politicians have changes, it seems reasonable that their views should change, just as they do for scientists.

A more promising alternative explanation is that effective leadership requires conviction. We want politicians to be effective leaders who can marshal support from others. Simple, clear, consistent messages tend to garner support, whereas complex, situation-dependent answers tend to confuse followers. In a democracy, leaders are elected based in part on the policies they advocate, so if they change these policies, they may be guilty of misleading their supporters. Such changes may also mislead their allies and embolden adversaries. Moreover, we are particularly concerned that politicians are subject to changing their views for bad reasons, not because the evidence has changed. For example, they bend to shifts in popular opinion or respond to forceful lobbying from powerful special interests. Such shifts often seem to betray weakness or lack of integrity. Convictions, specifically beliefs that others can count on, are particularly important for leadership roles.

Most of the time, scientists are not trying to lead a populace; they are primarily interested in what is true. The evidence for what is true may be unclear, complex, or changing, so scientists typically respond in kind. The role of scientist is subject to much less social demand for consistency over time or certainty at a time. The nature of science requires responsiveness to shifting evidence and acknowledgment of uncertainty. We want scientists to be open to new hypotheses that might better explain the evidence.¹ Many of our greatest scientists, like Einstein, are exemplars of humility.

On this account, differences in the legitimate social demands associated with the roles of political leader and scientist create the puzzle. Although this may be a partial explanation, it cannot be the whole story, because it is still unclear how a leader can appropriately have policy convictions when the policies must be in part evaluated on the basis of changing scientific evidence. It now appears that our norms for leadership are in tension with wise leadership decision-making (which requires more humility). We should want leaders who are willing to change their minds when the evidence warrants it. A more complete explanation must await our discussion of how we can integrate conviction and humility.

This puzzle reveals one tension between conviction and humility, but there are others. Shared convictions can reinforce social bonds and simplify group actions. Convictions also reduce uncertainty and bolster self-esteem. Having convictions tends to feel good; sometimes we reasonably want the stability they provide. Yet convictions can also polarize a society, dividing it into competing tribes. By contrast, humility can build bridges across cultural differences, open us to alternative ways of living, fuel our curiosity, and speed our growth. We must balance the benefits of conviction and humility if we are to flourish.

These tensions do not mean humility and conviction are opposites. Indeed, humility is better juxtaposed with arrogance. Convictions can be arrogant, but they need not be. Nonetheless, developing the skillful habits associated with conviction is often at odds with the practice of developing humility skills. Unfortunately, our cultural institutions give undue weight to conviction in our lives. This results in too many beliefs becoming firm convictions that we are unwilling to question, and too much emphasis on conviction skills. We need to build skillful habits of humility strong enough to balance and temper the cultural emphasis on conviction.

Our Conviction Conveyor Belt

Our current political polarization is a salient manifestation of a conviction-oriented culture. On both the right and the left, viewpoints have hardened, and compromise has become increasingly unattractive.² Key votes in Congress are divided largely along party lines. Even when bipartisan legislation passes, it is often underpublicized. Powerful feedback loops between political leaders, media, and the politically oriented populace serve as conviction generation machines that transform ordinary beliefs into identity-forming “undeniable truths.”

An insightful book by Michael Lynch, Know-It-All Society, examines the personal and cultural dynamics that result in the multiplication of convictions, creating an age of “intellectual arrogance.”³ Lynch characterizes a conviction as “a commitment that reflects the kind of person we want to be.”⁴ We can envision a continuum between a mere belief that we could easily change, through an emotional commitment that begins to become part of our identities, and on to self-defining commitments that we cannot imagine changing. Key institutions in our society, especially those connected to morality and politics, tend to create conveyor belts that move ordinary beliefs up the continuum to hard convictions. This has happened to views about climate change, which increasingly form litmus tests for whether one belongs to the left-wing political tribe or the right-wing tribe. Many on the left are convinced that we are in a climate crisis, while many on the right are convinced that climate fears are overblown at best and at worst part of a deliberate hoax designed to expand government interference in the market. The irony is that beliefs about the existence of climate change seem to be paradigm cases of empirical beliefs best settled by scientific evidence. But their entanglement with tribal identity has moved them up the conviction conveyor belt.

Robert Abelson complicates Lynch’s picture of convictions.⁵ He identifies three dimensions along which convictions may vary: emotional commitment, ego preoccupation, and cognitive elaboration. The emotional commitment dimension is most evident in the discussion of flip-flopping and in Lynch’s analysis. It includes the degree to which a belief is part of our identities, its degree of certainty, and its likelihood of changing. The ego preoccupation dimension includes the strength of the belief, the frequency of thinking about it, and its importance. These two dimensions overlap, but we can take a belief to be certain and unchanging without believing it to be very important or thinking about it often. For example, I am quite sure that there are dust bunnies under my bed, but I rarely think about it and don’t care much. The third dimension, cognitive elaboration, pertains to how well we have worked out the implications of a conviction, and how long we have held it. For a belief to be a conviction, it must be relatively high on at least two dimensions.

A conviction that climate change is the most pressing concern facing humanity nicely illustrates the way Abelson’s three dimensions can affect our lives. This conviction often involves high ego preoccupation. It is highly salient and strongly held. It often leads to behavior choices like using mass transportation and renewable energy. For some people with this conviction, though, cognitive elaboration may be low; their understanding of the details of climate science may be hazy. As a result, they avoid contentious conversations about climate change and prefer to talk with peers who share their conviction. Although high emotional commitment may be associated with high ego preoccupation, it need not be. A conviction about a climate crisis may not be part of their identity and may be quite changeable. Next month, human population growth, or inequality, or biodiversity loss may seem much more important, and it may motivate different behavioral changes. Our conviction conveyor belt sometimes leaves old convictions in the dust as other issues receive more attention. In just a few years, immigration issues have become highly salient, generating widespread competing convictions in a fairly short time.

Our media system plays key roles in our cultural emphasis on conviction. As many have noted, the fragmentation of our media along ideological lines means that most of us are exposed to stories that support our worldviews. We tend to select our news sources, such as Fox News, MSNBC, or public radio, in part because their stories reinforce our beliefs.⁶ Increasingly, though, the American public accesses news media online. Since most online media make their money through advertisements, they need to maximize page views, which can be achieved with more sensational depictions of disasters resulting from policies supported by our opponents or by directly demonizing these opponents as ignorant, out of touch, or corrupt. Popular commentators are often role models for having strong convictions. Humility is rarely in evidence; it simply does not make good copy. We still find lots of good, fact-based reporting online, and typically some balance in viewpoints that are expressed in major media outlets. I do not want to overstate the power of the media’s contribution to the conviction conveyor belt. But given the structure and economics of our major media sources, the tilt is toward belief reinforcement.

Social media is in many ways worse. As Lynch points out, platforms like Facebook and Twitter (restyled as “X”) are designed to build emotional engagement, not intellectual growth. They achieve this by enabling bonds with like-minded people and populating feeds with media that will appeal to us given our prior preferences. They can do very well at fostering bonding social capital, in-groups that share key values and viewpoints. But they struggle to support the expansion of bridging social capital, interactions across bonded groups. The more we are exposed to views that are like our own, the more our viewpoints are reinforced and become strengthened. This is not irrational. Much of what we believe is based on the testimony of others, such as scientists, teachers, doctors, and peers. Agreement among those whose testimony we respect tends to increase our confidence in that testimony. Consensus on a belief certainly does not show it is correct; logicians would call this the bandwagon fallacy. It does lend credibility to testimony, however. It is one of the ways we test testimony. Studies on group polarization also indicate that after discussion in homogeneous groups, viewpoints tend to become more extreme.⁷ For example, when most jurors generally agree regarding an outcome in civil cases, they tend to give higher awards than the individuals would have given in advance of discussions. Not only do our beliefs become stronger; they tend to become more extreme as a result of the kind of media environments that surround us.

Insofar as the institutions of business and politics idealize forceful leaders who model strong, emotionally committed beliefs, they too contribute to our bias in favor of conviction. Indeed, the feedback loops between education, media, and leadership models reinforce a picture of how we should approach problems—with the clarity, conviction, and confidence that will effectively move people to act. Although confidence and conviction are separable, they are close cousins. For example, confidence about our belief-generating mechanisms is involved in conviction, and high self-confidence tends to be associated with a strong sense of identity, including identity-forming beliefs. Innumerable books about success talk about how to build self-confidence. Confidence is seductive, powerful, and intoxicating. Our cultural love affair with confidence, with the “can-do attitude,” is yet one more contributor to the conviction orientation that competes with cultivation of humility skills.

The role that media and politics play in ratcheting up conviction became highly salient as the COVID-19 pandemic spread. Information about the dangers associated with the spread of the virus was fragmentary and evolved very quickly. In the early phase, scientists and public health officials emphasized that we did not have enough evidence to form firm beliefs about how contagious the virus was or how likely it was to kill people in different groups. But understandably, people felt discomfort with the uncertainty that was warranted by our situation; politicians and media personalities responded with more authoritative views, which often reflected their political beliefs. On the right, people tended to downplay the dangers, and on the left, there were calls for swift government action. Politicized narratives regarding the virus threat began to form, and these influenced information flow throughout the pandemic.

As infections and deaths rose, the majority of the country entered lockdown. Still, confirmation biases tended to reinforce ordinary people’s answers to questions about whether this lockdown was necessary. Those who were focused on the economy or on individual freedoms were skeptical about a lockdown and urged lifting it quickly. Others concerned about vulnerable populations thought that lockdowns came too late and that government actions were insufficient. Throughout the pandemic, only anecdotal evidence could be acquired firsthand; all other information needed to be filtered through testimony, usually from sources selected because of fit with preferred ideological orientations. The rational thing for most people to do would have been to double down on humility—to recognize how much is unknown and to avoid firm belief, to be patient about lack of clear guidance from officials, and to make decisions based on their general approach to decision-making under uncertainty. But because we live in an age of media fragmentation and increasing distrust in social institutions, divergent, quickly formed beliefs became hard convictions, and it was difficult to marshal support for a unified approach to the pandemic.

Even our education system, which could be a humility magnifier, seems conviction-oriented. Take, for example, a standard approach to teaching and assessing critical thinking: the thesis defense paper or speech. When completed efficiently, this kind of assignment usually leads to cherry-picking evidence to support an antecedent viewpoint. Even when such an assignment requires consideration of alternative views and objections, we have to be honest and admit that we generally receive just a more sophisticated selection of confirmatory information. Such a paper rarely results from a genuinely balanced investigation, even if it does teach some argumentative skills. We want students to learn argumentative skills, but it would be even better if they also learned how to provide a careful assessment of the strengths and weakness of the view they are inclined to accept. If we focused more on developing humility in the classroom, the process of educating for critical thinking would focus more on how to navigate uncertainty while gearing the degree of belief to the evidence. Though some of this does happen, it is far from the norm, in my experience. Our standard educational practices, including those associated with the movement to build youth self-esteem, create a bias in favor of conviction. This tendency is amplified where ideological rigidity among some students and faculty reinforces common beliefs.

Social forces are not the only causes of our conviction emphasis. We are all predisposed toward reinforcing our beliefs. A sizable literature on confirmation bias shows how we tend to seek out evidence that supports our views and ignore inconvenient evidence that undermines them.⁸ For example, in the famous Wason experiment, participants were given a short series of numbers and asked what the rule was that generated the series.⁹ They formed hypotheses and then tested these by asking whether another series fit the rule. A significant majority used only series that would confirm their hypothesis, which typically prevented them from finding out that their hypothesis was false. Confirmation bias is one of many nonrational belief reinforcers. We also tend to resist change, so that once we have invested in a belief, an inertia sets in that makes us reluctant to abandon it.

My point in this section is not just that our institutions tend to increase our motivations for forming convictions in ourselves and others; they cultivate skills that build conviction and confidence. Such skills include the techniques often featured in confidence-building books for shifting our self-image—our internal monologues and our self-presentation. They include methods like those found in marketing texts for building emotional connections, and techniques taught in most composition classes for developing a sustained argument. More advanced skills deal with how one creates communities that reinforce and strengthen emotional commitment and move belief into tribal identities. President Donald Trump very skillfully used in-group/out-group dynamics to reinforce convictions and undermine the effectiveness of criticism by the use of ridicule, ad hominem arguments, and colorful distractions. We can appreciate these genuine skills whatever we believe regarding the use to which they are put.

To be clear, I am not saying that everyone has too many convictions or too much self-confidence. Convictions are important. Some people with too few convictions seem unmoored and are often unmoved by crises we face. Our problem is closer to Yeats’s famous couplet in “The Second Coming”: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”¹⁰ My claim is that key cultural institutions overemphasize conviction in our lives, and that results in too many beliefs becoming hard convictions that we are unwilling to question or change. When that happens, we have too much “passionate intensity,” and it becomes hard to change direction when the circumstances require it and to work effectively with those who have different convictions.

Humility and Flourishing Now

Like conviction, humility has multiple dimensions of meaning. The recent literature features more than a dozen different accounts of humility and its close cousin modesty, but these can be roughly divided into two groups. One group identifies humility with our self-assessments, the second group with our approach to social interactions. Self-assessment views include owning our cognitive and moral limitations, acknowledging our strengths (without overemphasizing them), and appropriately assessing the evidence for our beliefs. Social interaction views focus on how we treat others, especially those who are differently situated or who have different beliefs. They include having low concern for status and entitlements, focusing primarily on others rather than ourselves, and being open to others’ viewpoints. I see these accounts as highlighting different clusters of humility skills rather than forming competing accounts of what humility is.

I divide humility skillful habits into three broad categories: those skills that directly soften conviction, those involved in the reflective practices that assess our limitations, and those that help us to focus on others rather than ourselves. The conviction-softening skills prevent beliefs from moving up the conviction conveyor belt too far. They enable us to avoid undue emotional commitment and ego preoccupation with beliefs and thereby make us more cognitively flexible. Reflection skills strengthen our abilities to accurately assess our strengths and weaknesses, which has an indirect effect on our levels of conviction. Decentering-self skills enable us to be more open to and focused on others’ perspectives. Box 2 summarizes the main humility skills I discuss in this chapter. Before exploring these skills, we need to see why our current cultural emphasis on conviction is so problematic—why we need to cultivate stronger humility skills.

Box 2. Humility skills

Soft-conviction skills

Exercising skepticism regarding conviction hardeners
Moderating emotional commitment and other elements of conviction
Communicating nuances in strength of beliefs

Reflection skills

Identifying and owning our cognitive limitations
Appreciating our strengths
Effectively using our mistakes
Developing sustainable reflective practices and peer groups

Decentering-self skills

Prioritizing attending to others
Exercising genuine curiosity about alternative viewpoints
Reducing concern about status and entitlement
Feeling gratitude for contributions of others

One danger of an overemphasis on conviction is that we become intellectually arrogant, which Lynch defines as being certain that our viewpoints are correct and that we have nothing to learn from other viewpoints.¹¹ Conviction alone need not have this implication, but when conviction becomes part of the identity of a tribe, and the tribe sees itself as superior in light of its correct convictions, the social reinforcement cycles lead to intellectual arrogance.¹² When we believe listening to our opponents is pointless and compromise untenable, then we view issues as zero-sum games. As we saw in chapter 2, where such a competitive approach to problem-solving dominates, we have little capacity to forge creative win/win solutions that are necessary to address many of our challenges. If tribes are roughly evenly matched, gridlock becomes common, and in worst-case scenarios, violence seems the only viable exit door. Humility enables us to see the limitations of our tribe and weakens identity based on conviction.

Intellectual arrogance is not just a barrier to effective collaboration; it also leads to misguided assessments of our limitations and thus more cognitive mistakes. Convictions about the behavior of complex systems that we are destabilizing are rarely warranted. We have seen that thresholds beyond which a system changes rapidly are often hard to identify in advance. We often fail to understand important feedback loops. Furthermore, small-scale perturbations in a system may unexpectedly have large impacts on system dynamics (through the “butterfly” effect). For example, we may model how ice cap melting may affect ocean currents, but we typically do not know which model best represents thresholds that govern shifts in the Gulf Stream. Under these conditions, having convictions about how likely we are to shut down the Gulf Stream seems unwise.

Of course, we must have beliefs about these systems in order to act, but we should be acutely aware of the limitations of our understanding and the dangers of using ideology to fill gaps in our knowledge. We may have ample justification for beliefs about causal interactions of some elements of a system—for example, that increasing the use of renewable energy will decrease total carbon emissions. But that does not mean we have nothing to learn from people who disagree with us on the wisdom of renewable energy incentives. People differently situated within the nested systems affected by incentives may see potential unintended side effects that should be taken into consideration. As we saw in our initial puzzle, once we move from general principles to their application in a context, hardened convictions are much harder to defend. As we grapple with the systemic dimensions of more wicked problems, our flourishing will be enhanced by greater open-mindedness and fewer hard convictions. Humility enables us to fine-tune our epistemic evaluation of beliefs.

Further, insofar as the United States is moving from the growth/conservation phases of the adaptive cycle through release and reorganization, humility protects us from being too bound by past experience. Convictions about systems behaviors and how to manipulate systems effectively are acquired through induction from past experiences or testimony from others whose inductions we trust. Thus, holding strong convictions about how to respond to a system dynamic requires the assumption that we know enough based on the past to decide how to proceed. But when systems structures are changing dramatically, induction regarding system behavior is less reliable. Prudence demands more humility and less conviction. We should avoid the hubris involved in generalizing the knowledge that we do have beyond its legitimate scope.

Intellectual arrogance also suppresses creativity. The release and reorganization phases of the adaptive cycle put a premium on creativity. We must consider more “out-of-the-box” solutions to our challenges in order to develop novel prototypes that may successfully lead to fruitful ways of reorganizing the system. Creativity is important for navigating all phases of the adaptive cycle, but the breadth of creativity must expand in the back-loop phases. The more convictions we have, the more our creativity is constrained. If we just seek solutions compatible with unearned convictions, we will miss promising novel solutions. The history of science contains many such examples. Among the most famous is how the conviction that planets must have circular orbits made it very hard to reconcile the new Copernican heliocentric model of the solar system with increasingly precise data regarding planetary movement. Only when Kepler abandoned the conviction and explored elliptical orbits could the heliocentric system make significant progress. Humility bolsters creativity.

Finally, our tendency to follow those who demonstrate conviction creates special problems for leaders; they face significant pressure to claim that they know how to proceed in circumstances that generally make such knowledge claims unwarranted. For example, in 2014–15, President Obama confronted a complex situation in the Middle East. The Islamic State (ISIS) expanded its activities in Syria and Iraq and created affiliates in other countries that orchestrated massive terrorist attacks, notably the attacks in Paris where over 130 people were killed. He was severely criticized in late 2015 when he said that he did not yet have a strategy for defeating the Islamic State and that he was consulting military advisers, allies, and Congress before determining his strategy. His statements were honest and probably reasonable given the uncertainties about what strategies would be successful, but they also violated the strong social norm that good leaders should know what to do. To many, he looked weak and unconvincing as a leader. In such situations our norms encourage self-deception or hypocrisy in our leaders. Leaders must either ignore the uncertainties and come to believe that they do know what to do, or they must consciously say they know when they do not. Neither option is attractive. Over time, both hypocrisy and self-deception result in lack of trust in the institutions that we need to help us address our challenges.

Flourishing in the age of climate change will require more cognitive flexibility, more creativity, and more careful assessment of the justification we have for our beliefs. Where increasing conflict tends to harden conviction, we will be better off if we exercise the skills of softening conviction. When rapidly changing circumstances upend familiar ways of addressing problems, we will be more likely to flourish if we become more comfortable adopting experimental approaches to decision-making—testing novel ideas rather than working through the implications of convictions. We must be ready to change our minds quickly and to listen to diverse perspectives in order to find our blind spots. Strengthening humility skills will help each of us to flourish, and if enough of us strengthen these habits we will be more likely to reach the collaborative solutions to problems that approaching sustainability requires. Of course, humility is important for flourishing during any timeframe; there are general reasons why humility and convictions skills should be in balance that I have not surveyed. My point is that we are seriously out of balance and that managing the challenges and opportunities associated with the next thirty years will require an emphasis on humility skills.

Integrating Conviction and Humility

Since our current emphasis on conviction makes humility seem like weakness, it is hard for us to see how conviction and humility can be integrated. We need to see how both sets of skills can be used together in the appropriate situations and how both can be emphasized in our decision-making. We need a version of binocular vision here that integrates the skills associated with each. To see how this is possible, we need to draw a rough distinction between hard and soft convictions. “Hard” convictions are unyielding. They are treated as certain and important enough that they cannot be compromised. They are not up for debate, and they do not shift when our evidence changes. In other words, they involve high ego preoccupation and emotional commitment.

By contrast, “soft” convictions serve as a stable guide for behavior, and they involve enough emotional commitment to motivate group action, but they are usually far from certain. We may identify with a soft conviction, but that portion of our identity is modifiable under the right circumstances. We can compromise regarding our soft convictions. Soft convictions tend to have a moderate degree of ego preoccupation and emotional commitment. They serve to fulfill the roles played by conviction in our identities and in leadership, but we understand them to be modifiable if we acquire information that makes them unworkable.¹³ Soft convictions are more easily integrated with humility.

Soft convictions occupy a space on a continuum between mere beliefs and hard convictions. Any specific conviction may be harder with respect to one of Abelson’s three dimensions of commitment and softer with respect to others. Both hard and soft convictions may range widely with respect to degrees of cognitive elaboration. In general, the more we understand the implications of our views, the more reasonable it is to strongly hold a view if our investigations leave it well justified. However, frequently the more we know about a topic, the more we run into uncertainties, which warrant softer convictions. Unfortunately, in our culture, many hard convictions involve little cognitive elaboration. Ironically, the less one knows, often the easier it is to hold firmly to a core belief.

The conviction conveyor belt tends to harden conviction prematurely and render us less likely to assess our beliefs realistically. It rachets up emotional commitment and certainty in beliefs that have not earned that status—that are not sufficiently justified. Some beliefs are reasonably treated as hard convictions, but most should remain mere belief or soft convictions. Core moral beliefs or highly justified empirical beliefs may legitimately become harder convictions. For me, and many others, the belief that all people should be treated with equal respect is an appropriate hard conviction. An expert in a field who has invested tremendous effort into elaborating a viewpoint may reasonably form hard convictions regarding its central tenets. The problem is not the presence of hard convictions, but rather their overpopulation.

To combat the conviction conveyor belt, we need to strengthen conviction-softening skills. The first of these involves becoming skeptical about social conviction hardeners. Once we appreciate the social mechanisms that harden convictions, we can learn to note their presence and to be suspicious about their impacts. If I hear a commentator ranting about some egregious activity, my default reaction should be to raise questions about the claims. If I am surrounded by compatriots who are emotionally affirming some view, that situation should trigger me to think critically about its validity, rather than to join the bandwagon, even when it fits my biases. I am not suggesting that we should doubt everything we hear; most of what we know relies on the testimony of others. We should become good at thinking about alternative explanations for events that have strong emotional valence and to be suspicious about how the strength of our convictions might be manipulated or socially influenced.

Conviction softening also involves deliberately moderating our degree of certainty, our levels of emotional commitment, and the amount of attention accorded to a belief. Although we may not regularly deliberate about these levels, they are at least partially within our control. With some practice, we can choose how we allocate our attention. Attention can then be used to soften convictions. For example, when contemplating models used to predict the effects of climate change, we can choose to focus on potential areas of uncertainty regarding climate models, or we can focus on their shared implications. We can focus on worst-case scenarios, or we can focus on models nearer to best-case scenarios. Attending to each of these is important, but if I know that I have a tendency to focus on worst-case scenarios, I can choose to focus more on other scenarios.

Similarly, we have a degree of control over where we allocate emotional energy. When the latest outrage-inducing story about a politician’s actions tends to strengthen emotional commitment, I can learn to pause and bracket my emotions so I can assess their appropriateness. I may decide to believe the story without the fervor that would make it hard for me later to modify my beliefs if new evidence arises. These subskills of managing attention and commitment may also be used to bolster conviction, where undue focus on uncertainty makes us unwilling to commit to action. The key is to tune the skills so that soft convictions become reasonable stopping points for deliberation.

Another group of conviction-softening skills involves our abilities to communicate nuances regarding our beliefs. Being able to signal our degrees of commitment, certainty, preoccupation, and cognitive elaboration with respect to a conviction enables us to build trust within a group and to increase its capacity to act with flexibility. For example, leaders must often communicate enough commitment to a strategy to motivate followers to act without implying degrees of certainty that later lead to charges of hypocrisy. During World War II, Churchill communicated a powerful commitment to the cause of defeating the Nazis, but early in the war he avoided implying certainty that it would be accomplished. A similar position with respect to climate change seems reasonable. Sometimes, we may need to communicate a high degree of certainty about a principle but a much lower degree of certainty about its application in a context, without signaling a lack of commitment to the principle. In any contentious decision-making process, a leader’s communication has at least two audiences: those with whom the leader disagrees and those the leader represents. The skills of driving hard bargains while leaving open flexibility usually involve subtly communicating degrees of conviction.

Some might object that expressing uncertainty or moderated emotional commitment about beliefs weakens our case for action. Indeed, the opponents of climate action have tried to use uncertainty to undermine the case for action, arguing that we should not make the economic sacrifices involved in mitigating climate change until we know for sure that they are necessary. This example reinforces the view that we need to express hard convictions about the facts to convince others to act now. However, soft convictions can also have a powerful impact on action.

Rachel Carson’s approach to highlighting scientific uncertainty in Silent Spring provides a powerful example of using key soft-conviction skills to influence people. An analysis of her drafts of Silent Spring conducted by Walker and Walsh indicates that she quite deliberately used scientific uncertainty to amplify the risks of pesticides like DDT and to invite the public to participate in the debate about their growing use.¹⁴

By the time she embarked on the research that would become Silent Spring, Carson was a well-respected biologist and science writer. She had served for fifteen years in the US Bureau of Fisheries, which became the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), eventually becoming editor in chief for all FWS publications. She had written three popular books on the natural history of oceans. In her time as a public servant there is no evidence that she relished advocacy or sought controversy. Yet her deep concern regarding the potential impact of widespread pesticide use led her to write a book late in her life that would jump-start the environmental movement and make her one of its world-renowned leaders.

In post–World War II America, the public had enthusiastically embraced the role of science in developing new technologies that would improve quality of life. Carson was acutely aware that Silent Spring would buck that trend. She also knew it would generate a significant backlash from the chemical industries that made pesticides. Thus, she had to be careful not to overstate her case and provide detractors with ammunition for undermining her arguments. No doubt this was part of her motivation for being cautious in how she framed her evidence, but this does not explain either why she played up uncertainty increasingly in later drafts of the book or why that uncertainty did not have the effect of undermining her case for action. Walker and Walsh find thirty-three distinct places where Carson highlighted uncertainty using phrases such as the following:

No one knows what the ultimate consequences may be.

The whole concept of genetic damage by something in the environment is also relatively new, and is little understood except by the geneticists, whose advice is too seldom sought.

For this reason the role of chemicals in general use (rather than in laboratory experiments) had not yet been assessed. It is extremely important that this be done.

Scientists do not agree upon how much DDT can be stored in the human body.¹⁵

Throughout the book, Carson demonstrated the skills of carefully framing the degree of scientific evidence we have regarding the safety and potential negative impacts of pesticides. At the same time, she vividly described cases where negative impacts are evident, and the cumulative effect of such cases is telling.

Moreover, she moderated her expressions of belief and emotional commitment when confronted with contrary evidence. She had many experts read drafts of her chapters; Walker and Walsh show how she reframed key points after criticism from scientific experts in the field. For example, she sought Dr. George Criles’s views on her chapter about the relation of environmental toxins to cancer, and Criles was quite critical of her recitation of the evidence, calling it “overwritten” and suggesting that she was speculating.¹⁶ As a result, she added a paragraph in the published version indicating that “medical opinion is divided on the question” but continued on with evidence supporting her view.

Another indication of soft-conviction skills was her framing of the actions to be taken as a result of her evidence. She does not call for an outright ban on DDT and other pesticides; that would come later. Her conclusion is tempered and flexible. She advocated that such pesticides be used only when other methods would not work. Instead of presuming that after all of her research she has the expertise to decide what should be done, she invites the public to weigh in based on its values after considering all the evidence. As Walker and Walsh put the point:

Uncertainty’s dual function of disruption and actualization gives lay readers the rhetorical grounds on which to draw their own inferences and assert their right to know the potential hazards of environmental situations. It also loosens the ethical handcuffs on the scientific writer. The writer’s ethos changes from an authoritarian voice (“Let me tell you what is”) to a more collaborative one (“Let me tell you what we don’t know and what might happen”). Uncertainty helps fulfill the prophecy of Carson’s book that the public will decide for themselves.¹⁷

The public would have no role in a debate between scientists from the chemical industry and environmental groups, but by highlighting scientific ignorance, Carson creates room for the public to participate in policy formation by showing how values must carry the weight of argument in cases of uncertainty. Clearly Carson has significant emotional commitment to her views that we needed to change our practices of pesticide use, but she felt just as strongly that a collaborative public process was required to determine what policy is appropriate.

Carson closed Silent Spring with a critique of the arrogance associated with the control-of-nature philosophy that underlies widespread pesticide use to control insect outbreaks. The whole book is a call for humility before the complexity of nature and the uncertainties of our best science. Here we see leadership with passion and commitment but without the hard convictions that often undermine collaboration, creativity, and responsiveness to changing evidence.

The impact of Silent Spring was immediate. It was serialized in the New Yorker in the summer of 1962. The full book was published in September of that year, and it was selected as the Book of the Month for October, so it reached a large audience quickly. The anticipated harsh reaction from the chemical industry only served to increase its readership. Public opinion and that of much of the scientific community landed squarely on the side of restricting pesticide use within a year of its publication. By the early 1970s DDT was being phased out by the newly created Environmental Protection Agency.

Carson’s example illustrates how the use of soft-conviction skills can both stimulate action and help to avoid mistaken hard convictions that can backfire and reduce both trust and persuasiveness. She makes it clear that tentativeness is not to be equated with timidity; she is quite forceful in her advocacy. Her example suggests that she has developed a robust binocular vision that enables her to integrate moderate forms of conviction with a humble approach to her subject. This is a balancing act in which the possibility of changing her mind in light of new evidence and the emotional commitment to her concerns are both at the forefront of her thinking.

Reflection and Decentering the Self

The two other clusters of humility skills I highlight contribute to softening convictions, but I will focus primarily on other ways they enhance flourishing in the age of climate change. The skills of reflection are central to self-assessment views of humility mentioned above, and the decentering-self skills are associated with social interaction views of humility. The three humility skills clusters are mutually reinforcing, which partially explains why they are taken to be expressions of a single virtue.

The reflective skills associated with humility all involve stepping back from what we are doing and viewing it from a distance, thinking about our actions and their context from alternative perspectives, and frankly assessing ourselves. Engaging in these practices often enough and with increasing accuracy helps us avoid mistakes and learn from those we make. When the context for our action is novel or complex, reflection becomes even more important. This is especially true when the costs of error are high and the changes we must consider are great. We have seen that the age of climate change is a context where all these conditions apply. As we near release and reorganization on large scales, we must reflect more often and more astutely.

Perhaps the most important reflective skill involved in humility is recognizing our limitations or weaknesses and keeping them in mind as we act.¹⁸ Humble people are acutely aware of the weaknesses of their belief-forming processes. They act on that recognition by limiting their emotional commitments to beliefs. They recognize biases and work to rectify them. Such reflection reinforces soft-conviction skills. In a period of accelerating change, the limitations of our understanding become more pronounced. When our local systems are strongly impacted by the dynamics of larger systems nearing release, the uncertainties governing any action are magnified. To navigate the resulting turbulence, we must be acutely aware of the limitations in our understanding and yet maintain our ability to act and to change course when that is warranted.

A one-sided focus on our limitations, however, would likely lead to indecisiveness and low self-confidence. We must also reflect on our strengths—our genuine knowledge and our capacities to act. Such reflection can help us take appropriate pride in what we do well. Pride in this sense is distinct from intellectual arrogance. It does not involve certainty about our viewpoints or unwillingness to learn from others. Historically pride is sometimes understood as the sin resulting from lack of humility. So understood, pride inevitably involves failure to appreciate our limitations. Most current writers about humility acknowledge that reasonable pride is important and that it helps one to avoid the risks of too much humility.¹⁹ The skills of reflecting on our strengths serve as an antidote to an overemphasis on our limitations. When uncertainty is high, we must rely more heavily on our sense of character, but that character must be grounded on realistic assessments. As we saw, Rachel Carson was acutely aware of the limitations of her knowledge about the long-term impacts of pesticides, though she was rightfully aware that she still had a powerful case to make about their dangers. She knew the strength of these arguments, and the knowledge buoyed her as she took on the critiques of the pesticide industries.

Another reflective skill involves learning from our mistakes. No one likes to make mistakes, especially where large mistakes can have dramatic consequences. In this turbulent time, when inductions from the recent past are less reliable than in more stable periods, more mistakes are inevitable. To flourish, we must become more comfortable making small mistakes and rapidly learning from the results. Strengthening our capacity to take an experimental approach to decision-making—trying a possible solution on a small scale, evaluating its impacts, and adjusting the intervention to make it better—is one way to systematize learning from our mistakes. It does not apply in all circumstances, but it is a skill that is especially important when uncertainties are very high, as in the release and reorganization phases of the adaptive cycle. This practice is one of the best ways to assess how well we are balancing our focus on our limitations and our strengths.

Often, however, we cannot avoid our blind spots without the help of others who are willing to take the time to highlight our deficiencies. We need to get better at welcoming such criticism into our lives. We all tend to join groups of people who think alike. We feel at home in groups that reinforce our strong beliefs. As we have seen, this tendency, amplified by media that support our perspectives, fuels the conviction conveyor belt. It is less comfortable, yet more fruitful, to have some friends that challenge our beliefs and blind spots, but do so in a way we can hear. We need to cultivate friends who challenge us productively and work on becoming such a friend to others with whom we are close. We will return to this theme at the end of the chapter.

To strengthen our community of productive critics we need to foster the third large cluster of humility skills, which involve different ways of decentering the self in one’s interactions with others. Humble people are more interested in hearing from others than from themselves; they avoid centering their attention on the self. They have cultivated the skills of focusing primarily on others when they are interacting—listening well, attending to body language, being sensitive to ways that context shapes behavior. These skills reinforce the empathy skills we discussed in the last chapter. They are particularly important during periods of release when we need to build new relationships quickly and when conflict is heightened. Humble people are very good at being fully present when they interact with someone. They are curious about people. Arrogant people quickly lose interest when someone else is talking. Their eyes dart around, or they begin thinking about what they want to say.

In general, our ability to exercise curiosity assists in decentering ourselves and focusing on other people or parts of our environment. While we tend to think of curiosity as a trait that is not under our control, Todd Kashdan and others have done research that shows how we can strengthen curiosity and why it might be wise to do so.²⁰ We can learn how to ask good questions that elicit engaging answers. We can reframe a potentially boring situation so that details about group dynamics or behavior motivations become more interesting. We can learn how to draw wisdom from those who have experiences very different from our own. In short, we can develop the skills of learning from a wide range of human interactions.

Curiosity is crucial in times of rapid change, when having a learning mindset enables us to adapt quickly as circumstances shift and to experiment with innovative solutions to challenges. Instead of focusing on what we know, we focus on what we do not know but could learn through our interactions with the world. Kashdan has developed a multi-factor model of curiosity that identifies five habitual patterns of behavior, each of which can be modified to build curiosity skills. These include the social curiosity described above, and also our ability to tolerate the stress of novelty, our capacity to experience joy in exploring new aspects of the world, our tendencies to seek thrills, and our sensitivity to information deprivation. He has used this model to look at ways that organizations can cultivate cultures of curiosity.

Another skill of decentering the self involves ignoring any status and entitlements that our achievements may warrant. Arrogant people usually want others to acknowledge and reinforce their status. It may seem natural that people with PhDs and numerous publications have higher status than undergraduates in an academic setting. They may thus expect to speak first and at length about topics within their expertise. But humble professors interact with a group as if such status was irrelevant. Even if entitlements are proffered, they prefer to hear the views of others, offering their own views late in the conversation and without fanfare. We must cultivate the skills of selectively ignoring our own status in order to welcome fully all members of a group and to encourage alternative perspectives and productive critiques. When old status hierarchies are eroding, we are more likely to flourish if we are not focused on preserving our status.

The literature on humble leadership in business often features CEOs who so successfully decenter their selves that they become highly accessible to anyone in the company with a good idea or a concern.²¹ Mary Powell, the CEO of Green Mountain Power between 2008 and 2020, used the symbol of physical space allocation to signal this kind of humility. She eliminated the ornate upper-floor executive suite protected by two levels of executive assistants and instead occupied a desk in a cubical within an open workspace on the first floor in the customer service area. There she could interact regularly both with customer service agents and with customers who had issues.²² The symbol was clear: we are here to serve the interests of our customers. The leaders do not have all the ideas for how to do this better; those ideas often come from those on the front lines of the business. This kind of humble servant leadership model has a long history, but it still seems to be relatively rare in a society that exaggerates the importance of status, celebrity, and conviction.²³

The last decentering-self skill I will mention is acting with gratitude. When we approach other people with gratitude, we focus primarily on what they bring to us. We avoid taking them for granted. Gratitude opens us to the world and has a positive impact on our flourishing, our mental health, and our physical health.²⁴ If we are humble, we typically think that the positive things that happen to us are not fully deserved—they are gifts. Gifts trigger gratitude. Arrogant people typically think they deserve a great deal, and thus they take for granted many of their positive experiences. Such experiences are to be expected because of who they are, consequently they do not feel as much gratitude. To be sure, we should also be thankful for getting what we deserve. We do not create the situations that enable just deserts to be rewarded. The skills associated with gratitude include seeing many of our experiences as gifts and hence feeling thankfulness for them. We learn to focus on what others do for us, often beyond the call of duty. We become good at conveying gratitude in a genuine way that builds relationships. We learn how to approach even daunting situations with the tendency to see the gifts that lie therein. In times when conflict is commonplace, having well-honed skills of gratitude makes the world feel less cruel. Gratitude supports flourishing in most contexts, but its skillful habits are most needed when the times are turbulent and grim.

The hubris at play in our increasing political polarization over the last several decades has made issues of conviction and humility highly salient, and this has stimulated a vast interdisciplinary literature on humility.²⁵ We even see noteworthy academic centers devoted to issues surrounding humility, such as the Institute for Humility and Conviction in Public Life at the University of Connecticut. We have powerful cultural resources from which to draw lessons about cultivating humility, resources that should appeal to both conservatives and liberals. Humility is a core virtue in Christian traditions (and many other religions), and some of our iconic national leaders such as Washington and Lincoln exhibited key humility skills. But the allure of conviction, self-assertion, and status remains dominant. We need more concrete examples of how to build humility skills and to develop the reinforcing feedback loops that turn them into habits.

Building Humility Skills

We know from the last chapters that building the skillful habits associated with flourishing involves practicing them and finding mentors who can guide our practice. We also need to refine the feedback mechanisms involved in reflecting well on our performance. Reflection is not just a crucial element of humility; it is a necessary skill for cultivating the judgment required in any positive character trait. Friendships play an important role informing reflection and supporting practice, as is illustrated in the following stories. I begin with the story of Robert (Bob) Cabin’s journey as a practitioner of ecological restoration, which he described in his book Intelligent Tinkering.²⁶

In 1996, Bob Cabin was offered a postdoctoral fellowship at the National Tropical Botanical Garden, where he began working on restoration in the garden’s Ka‘upulehu Dry Forest Preserve on the Big Island of Hawaii. The preserve had been invaded by a very aggressive nonnative plant, African fountain grass, that was crowding out native species and creating a monoculture. Many of Hawaii’s native ecosystems have been overwhelmed by invasive species and land-development pressures; as a result, the islands have more endangered and threatened species than any other state in the United States. What started as a two-year postdoc turned into a ten-year stint as a participant, planner, and leader of community-based dry forest restoration in numerous locations in Hawaii. During that time, Cabin wrestled constantly with the tension between designing projects to generate findings that would reflect and contribute to restoration science and designing them to maximize their ecological impact. He began his work with the conviction that good restoration should be conducted as science and should be guided by scientific knowledge. After his many years working in the field, his reflections led him to a much more pluralistic view of the practice of restoration, one that manifests the humility skills we have explored.

When he arrived in Hawaii, Cabin joined a small group of stakeholders who were deeply concerned about the fate of local dry forests. Started by a volunteer couple, the North Kona Dryland Forest Working Group had a great deal of passion but no clear leadership structure. Since Cabin had a doctoral degree, he was often treated as the leader, even though he had very little practical knowledge about restoration of these specific ecosystems. In such circumstances, some people would have enjoyed the attention and leveraged their degrees to turn their initial beliefs into convictions about how to proceed. But Cabin was a listener by nature. He was acutely aware of the knowledge he lacked and actively sought guidance from those who had been working in such ecosystems for years. He also dove into the rough work of pulling fountain grass and planting native replacements; he was not just a scientific adviser and researcher.

The tensions between restoration science and practice served as the impetus for Cabin’s deep reflection, just as the tensions between our cultural conviction orientation and our current need for cognitive flexibility can motivate further development of our own humility skills. As a good scientist, Cabin created experimental plots to compare results of different treatments. He carefully monitored the plots and measured impacts of restoration treatments. Science should answer questions like whether pulling fountain grass is more effective than herbicide treatment, whether shade affects native seedling mortality rate, when one can stop watering seedlings, or which planting techniques most affect mortality rates. The grants he wrote aimed to inform future restoration by answering such questions. Most scientists would have measured their success largely in terms of knowledge acquired and publications, but Cabin was also concerned about how much actual restoration was accomplished. And, alas, the process of scientific restoration was both time-consuming and expensive.

After local successes, the Kona Dry Forest Working Group grew considerably, involving more agency personnel and more volunteers. It took on larger projects and used many more volunteers. The desire to scale up the group’s activities contributed to deepening disagreements about a wide range of tactical questions. How much weight should be placed on the quality of the volunteer experience? How precisely documented should the treatments be? How much should the cultural significance of certain plants matter? Whose culture is most relevant? As Cabin scaled up his research, he needed to use more volunteers, but it was hard to rely on volunteers to accurately monitor the results of different treatments. Many volunteers participated because they wanted to make a significant difference rapidly, which led some crew leaders to adopt a “just get it done” approach to native planting or weeding. More was accomplished, but at the cost of good science.

Cabin’s bosses wanted him to focus on the science, but the more he reflected on what the science was achieving, the less he was convinced that it was as important as maximizing restoration activity on the landscape. Over the course of the decade, he became increasingly concerned about the limitations of the knowledge generated by restoration science. Practical considerations, such as how to get water to new plantings and how many volunteers were available, dictated restoration planning as much as good science. Many of the issues he confronted had not been addressed in the literature, and where they had, Cabin found that often he could not generalize from other ecosystem contexts to his Hawaii projects. Minor differences in microclimate or plant interactions mattered more than ecosystem similarities. He became acutely aware of how little science can say about exactly how to restore a specific highly degraded area and increasingly sympathetic with the practitioners who said that their own trial-and-error application of practices that had worked elsewhere was often a more reliable guide than scientific papers. His own experience of developing elegant plans in the office and then finding them ill-suited to the idiosyncrasies of the site created an opportunity to learn from error that he grasped with relish.

The debates among personnel from agencies with different missions and volunteers with different values made working-group meetings longer and less helpful as the scale of operations increased. As a scientist, Cabin initially treated many of these debates as focused on what restoration strategies would be most effective, but increasingly he found they revolved around conflicting values, which science was not equipped to address. Instead of feeling like his expertise was increasing, he found himself more and more focused on the limitations of his training to address the issues that divided stakeholders. Indeed, he was curious about the diverse approaches to restoration represented in the group, and over time he became increasingly convinced that using multiple approaches provided a more reasonable way of responding to severe ecosystem degradation. There remained a tremendous need for more ecological restoration in the region, and it seemed foolish to alienate those who might help, even if the results were imperfect by scientific standards.

At the end of the book, Cabin recalls standing on the highway overlooking the area in which he started working in Hawaii, which was surrounded by huge tracts of highly degraded land, full of fountain grass. Despite the restoration achievements, their group had barely dented the problem. He had an epiphany. Instead of designing restorations in accord with best science, he concluded it would be better to promote a “meta-intelligent tinkering Adopt-an-Acre” program in which different groups of people with different goals would be able to pursue their vision for the land, within some agreed-upon constraints. Restoration would be better and faster if those in charge humbly acknowledged what they did not know and let lots of different projects proceed on the landscape rather than trying to impose a single standard on restoration projects.

The phrase “intelligent tinkering” comes from Aldo Leopold. Leopold was acutely aware of the limitations of our knowledge of natural systems and its implications for how we manipulate such systems. In his characteristically pithy fashion, he says, “If the biota, in the course of eons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.”²⁷ Viewed narrowly, Leopold is urging us to preserve all species, even if we do not see how they contribute to system functioning. But Cabin extracts a larger message about humility from the idea that we should view our restoration efforts as a form of tinkering—that is, as a set of experiments where we try out different approaches to getting what we want without further compromising the larger system.

In this all-too-brief story about a decade of ecological restoration learning, we see the full set of reflective skills at work. Cabin begins by being aware of the limitations of his knowledge of Hawaiian ecology, but his awareness of limitations grows significantly to include limitations on the application of restoration science, on the capacity to generalize across similar ecosystems, on how to address value differences, and on how to manage group interactions. He begins with soft convictions about the role of science in doing good restoration, which he subsequently modifies both in response to the difficulty of applying them in the field and in order to work more collaboratively with others in the group. He consistently experiments and learns from his mistakes; his book is a chronicle of how he builds a network for peers to test his own reflective learning. But at the same time, he is also aware of the strengths he brought to the enterprise and proud of his accomplishments. As he puts the point, “Once again, I was proud of our research, the specific knowledge we gained and the more general academic contributions we made, and the indirect yet substantial ways in which our work contributed to the North Kona Dryland Restoration Working Group’s restoration and outreach programs. Yet as valuable as all that science had been, I was painfully aware that we had not discovered much that was of direct practical value to the restoration of this and other degraded ecosystems.”²⁸

Cabin also exhibits the range of decentering-self skills. In the working group, he is more inclined to listen than to expound. He eschews the status and entitlements that might accompany his PhD and relishes the physical labor of restoration and the camaraderie that comes of sharing sweaty work. He demonstrates genuine curiosity about the motivations of volunteers who work for him and the experiences of practitioners who do not have advanced degrees. Throughout the book, he is effusive in his gratitude for all that people have contributed both to his development and to the work of restoring degraded landscapes. We can imagine other biologists reacting very differently to the experiences that Cabin has over these years—being more aloof, being more focused on maximizing publications, and being more convinced that science provides the answers about how to approach restoration. Cabin brings some humility skills to Hawaii, but these are reinforced and strengthened through the course of his work there. Throughout his book, we can see how his initial dispositions create positive feedbacks that refine and elaborate the skills in question. Someone bringing fewer humility skills would have been unlikely to arrive at a pluralistic intelligent tinkering approach to restoration and to become such a powerful reflective storyteller.

Bob Cabin’s story reveals that the exercise of reflective skills is not a solitary venture. In our individualistic culture, we often emphasize the individual’s primary responsibility for cultivating character through practice. Cabin’s interactions with his restoration group play a crucial role in his growth. Others not only provide material on which to reflect and opportunities for practicing; they often provide direct feedback about how one is balancing competing values. Cabin developed friendships with people whose views he respected. As a result, he was open to learning from their feedback.

Here it is worth pausing to appreciate the role of developing a diversity of friendships in triangulating between humility and conviction and in augmenting other character strengths. This idea has a long history. Aristotle believed that friendship was crucial for developing virtue for two main reasons.²⁹ First, having genuine friends brings out the best in people. We care for friends’ welfare for their own sakes, and thus we work hard to act in ways that promote their interests even when these are in tension with our own narrow self-interest. Second, friends will challenge us when we fall short of the character to which we aspire, because they want the best for us.³⁰ Both of these points figure in helping us to triangulate between conviction and humility. In learning how to be a friend well, we must learn how to navigate conflicting convictions, often softening them to enable concord. But we must also support conviction, when forceful action is required. Just knowing someone cares and believes in you often provides the support that enables action in uncertainty.

Rachel Carson’s deep friendship with Dorothy Freeman seems to have played a crucial role in providing such support for the process of writing Silent Spring. Carson wrote a letter to Freeman that included the following tribute to this friendship:

I don’t suppose anyone really knows how a creative writer works (he or she least of all, perhaps!) or what sort of nourishment his spirit must have. All I am certain of is this; that it is quite necessary for me to know that there is someone who is deeply devoted to me as a person, and who also has the capacity and the depth of understanding to share, vicariously, the sometimes-crushing burden of creative effort, recognizing the heartache, the great weariness of mind and body, the occasional black despair it may involve—someone who cherishes me and what I am trying to create.³¹

For both Carson and Aristotle, such genuine friendships are rare, but that depth of friendship is not required for the aid to reflection that friends can provide. If we cultivate relationships of mutual respect and care that are characterized by honesty and a diversity of viewpoints, we will find both support and challenge that strengthen our reflective skills, providing we are open to the feedback.

Like other character traits, humility may be expressed in some situations and not others. We may have a set of skillful habits that we do not use consistently. For example, it could be a mistake to generalize from Cabin’s use of humility skills in Hawaiian restoration to his having that broad character trait. Indeed, friends often help us to see such inconsistencies in our behavior. But learning skills in one context often does inform behavior in other contexts. Wondering whether Cabin had a hard conviction that intelligent tinkering was the best approach to restoration across contexts, I asked him how far he would extend his pluralism. He replied that he has become more and more skeptical about generalizations of many sorts, including about whether intelligent tinkering itself should be generalized to all restoration. What began as a recognition that ecosystem variability makes generalization in ecology risky expanded to include most generalizations about restoration and about science’s role in policy.³² In his case, the humility skills were applied increasingly broadly, as he reflected on the importance of the lessons he learned.

Cabin’s story illustrates how opportunities to use our expertise in leadership roles provide numerous occasions for learning how to better integrate conviction and humility. In such circumstances, questions about how much we know collide with questions about what we need to do to lead effectively. On which of these should we focus? How can we integrate both into a kind of binocular vision that leads to intelligent tinkering solutions? I suspect that the puzzle with which we started this chapter reveals an inevitable tension in life between what people reasonably seek in leaders and ways we should all approach empirical questions. We can learn to reduce this tension by developing sophisticated humility skills, but we cannot eliminate it. However, if we do succeed in shifting social norms toward greater emphasis on humility, then the demands on leaders to express hard convictions will diminish and the tension will be reduced.

Both humility and collaborative skills are important for flourishing now, in large part because they strengthen our group problem-solving capacities, reduce social polarization and conflict, help us to broaden our understanding of the systems on which we depend, and help us to rapidly build new relationships with diverse peoples. We have seen that these benefits are particularly important given the challenges and opportunities characteristic of the age of climate change. We now turn to frugality skillful habits, which engage very different aspects of our lives—how we consume, what we find valuable, and how we relate to nonhuman nature. We will find though that all three clusters of skillful habits are mutually reinforcing. Humility is often associated with frugality. In the Christian Gospels, both are linked to core virtues exemplified by Jesus. In Taoist traditions, the pair, along with compassion, are the “three treasures” or core virtues. We often find that those who are unconcerned with status are also unconcerned about material possessions. Those temperate about their convictions are also temperate about their consumption.