Development and validation of a multi-dimensional measure of intellectual humility

Abstract

This paper presents five studies on the development and validation of a scale of intellectual humility. This scale captures cognitive, affective, behavioral, and motivational components of the construct that have been identified by various philosophers in their conceptual analyses of intellectual humility. We find that intellectual humility has four core dimensions: Open-mindedness (versus Arrogance), Intellectual Modesty (versus Vanity), Corrigibility (versus Fragility), and Engagement (versus Boredom). These dimensions display adequate self-informant agreement, and adequate convergent, divergent, and discriminant validity. In particular, Open-mindedness adds predictive power beyond the Big Six for an objective behavioral measure of intellectual humility, and Intellectual Modesty is uniquely related to Narcissism. We find that a similar factor structure emerges in Germanophone participants, giving initial evidence for the model’s cross-cultural generalizability.

Links between intellectual humility and acquiring knowledge

“…Even though IH has been linked to more general knowledge and better recognition memory (Alfano et al, 2017;Deffler et al, 2016), IH was not correlated with cognitive ability in the current study. Perhaps this is because the Wonderlic assesses both crystalized and fluid constructs (Matthews & Lassiter, 2007), thereby minimizing links to IH, which we hypothesized would relate to acquired knowledge, but not fluid cognitive abilities.…”

“…Previous research offers support for links between IH and indicators of learning. For example, IH has been linked to more general knowledge of people, places, and events, and better recognition memory (Alfano et al, 2017;Deffler, Leary, & Hoyle, 2016). This is consistent with the public perception that intellectually humble individuals are knowledgeable and smart (Samuelson et al, 2015).…”

“…However, the available research on this topic is limited and there are some inconsistencies across studies. For example, some empirical evidence suggests intellectual arrogance predicts better course grades among college students (Meagher, Leman, Bias, Latendresse, & Rowatt, 2015) and, as noted, findings regarding links between IH and overclaiming of knowledge are not consistent (Alfano et al, 2017;Deffler et al, 2016). Therefore, further research is needed to examine these relationships.…”

“…A number of previous studies have suggested IH may relate to how people judge what they do and do not know. Two studies have examined whether IH predicts less overclaiming of knowledge (i.e., claiming to have knowledge one doesn't have), one confirming this hypothesis (Alfano et al, 2017) and one finding no relationship (Deffler et al, 2016). In addition, there is experimental evidence that greater self-perceived knowledge independent of actual knowledge, a potential sign of intellectual arrogance, is associated with overclaiming of knowledge (Atir, Rosenzweig, & Dunning, 2015).…”

“…The purpose of study 3 was to use a more extensive assessment of IH to examine if IH is associated with knowledge gained in the form of general knowledge scores and whether IH relates to the likelihood of being overconfident about one's knowledge. Based on previous research (Alfano et al, 2017;Deffler et al, 2016), we anticipated IH would be associated with more general knowledge and more conservative claims of knowledge.…”