Intellectual Humility as a Cognitive Filter for AI-Generated Health Misinformation. An Evolutionary Perspective on Epistemic Vigilance

Marcin Rządeczka, Maciej Wodziński, Marcin Moskalewicz, Kacper Zacharski

Keywords: intellectual humility, AI-generated misinformation, epistemic vigilance, health communication, evolutionary psychology, foundation models for social good

TL;DR: For socially beneficial health AI, supporting users' critical thinking matters more than disclosing AI

Abstract: We present experimental findings from a study (N=99) examining how intellectual humility (IH), i.e., the metacognitive awareness of one's epistemic limitations, affects the evaluation of AI-generated health dialogues varying in scientific rigor. Participants were randomly assigned to evaluate one of three dialogues about exercise and mental health: scientifically accurate, moderately pseudoscientific, or strongly pseudoscientific. Results reveal that IH functions as a selective cognitive filter. Individuals with higher humility scores rated pseudoscientific content as significantly less credible, while showing no correlation with credibility assessments of accurate content. Crucially, humility did not predict the ability to identify AI as the source of dialogues, suggesting that epistemic vigilance operates on content quality rather than source attribution. We interpret these findings through an evolutionary lens, proposing that IH represents an ancestral adaptation for navigating informationally uncertain environments. It remains effective at detecting exploitation attempts in AI-generated content, despite humans lacking evolved mechanisms for detecting AI sources. The study contributes to understanding how foundation models might improve or undermine human epistemic defenses, especially in health communication contexts.

Paper Type: Long Paper

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Submission Number: 3