Jonah Koetke

I am a social scientist and Postdoc at The Ohio State University. My research focuses on understanding (1) ideological conflict and (2) public acceptance of accurate and science-based information. 

The United States faces growing political hostility and threats to democracy. I seek to understand the psychological causes of this hostility and find strategies for reducing it. In this work I often focus on the benefits of intellectual humility—the meta-cognitive awareness of one’s intellectual limitations. I therefore aim to understand barriers to intellectual humility in this domain and develop interventions to cultivate it. Beyond intellectual humility, I focus on the role of social cognitions and beliefs, for example by examining the effects of seeing outgroup members as individuated (vs. not) and threatening (vs. not). I also examine whether people see cross-party contact as normative or counter-normative, and the implications of this perception for conflict resolution.

In my second arm of research, I focus on understanding how people develop erroneous beliefs about the world and how we can cultivate acceptance of accurate beliefs. This line of work also leverages intellectual humility as a motivational source for seeking out accurate information. In newer work, I am focusing on how social cognitions, and in particular perceptions and attributions of others’ intellectual humility, affect acceptance of information from experts. I argue that people have lay beliefs about intellectual humility and often, but not always, trust experts who exhibit higher intellectual humility and therefore better epistemic habits.