Cognitive and Interpersonal Features of Intellectual Humility

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Citation: Mark R. Leary, Kate J. Diebels, Erin K. Davisson, Katrina P. Jongman-Sereno, Jennifer C. Isherwood, Kaitlin T. Raimi, Samantha A. Deffler, Rick H. Hoyle (2017/03/17) Cognitive and Interpersonal Features of Intellectual Humility. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (RSS)
DOI (original publisher): 10.1177/0146167217697695
Semantic Scholar (metadata): 10.1177/0146167217697695
Sci-Hub (fulltext): 10.1177/0146167217697695
Internet Archive Scholar (search for fulltext): Cognitive and Interpersonal Features of Intellectual Humility
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Summary

Define intellectual humility (IH) as (quote):

recognizing that a particular personal belief may be fallible, accompanied by an appropriate attentiveness to limitations in the evidentiary basis of that belief and to one’s own limitations in obtaining and evaluating relevant information.

Develop new IH scale, and four studies.

Study 1 uses a population of MTurkers to correlate IH with other scales, and finds that IH is positively correlated with with measures of openness and curiosity, negatively with measures of dogmatism, self-righteousness, and intolerance of ambiguity, and not correlated with social desirability bias (important for validity of scale), narcissism (IH negatively correlated with arrogance about beliefs, not oneself), and social vigilantism.

Study 2 showed a panel essays evaluating religion as positive, negative, or balanced. IH associated with higher ratings of accuracy of the negative and balanced essays, but not the positive one (maybe explained by most of the panel being religious).

Study 3 showed another panel politicians who had changed their positions. For independents and democrats, IH weakly associated with evaluating politician as having flip-flopped and having weak ethics -- low IH obtains only slightly better evaluations. For republicans, IH strongly associated with evaluating politician as having not flip-flooped and being ethical -- low IH obtains much poorer evaluations. The low IH republican poor evaluations may have to do with republicans being conservative in the sense of not liking change. Independents, democrats, and republicans had similar overall IH.

Study 4 used MTurkers who do or do not floss their teeth to assess weak (vacuous) and strong arguments for flossing. IH correlated with poorer evaluation of weak arguments and better evaluation of strong arguments, but for flossers, IH slightly correlated with poorer evaluation of both weak and strong arguments.

Future research:

  • how high/low IH people differ in how they process information and think about their beliefs
  • investigations into the metacognitive aspects of IH
  • whether IH people possess more accurate, nuanced, and useful knowledge than less intellectually humble people
  • interpersonal and social implications of IH

Theoretical and Practical Relevance

Press release: https://today.duke.edu/2017/03/modest-personality-trait-intellectual-humility-packs-punch

Interventions promoting IH could reduce conflict caused by ideology and dogmatism.

There is a school that includes IH among its 9 "master virtues", see http://www.ivalongbeach.org/academics/master-virtues

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