Is intellectual humility polarized too? A systematic examination of intellectual humility, political orientation, and strength of political belief

ABSTRACT

Intellectual humility (IH) appears to offer one solution to political hostility. However, research on how IH associates with political orientation and the strength of their political belief is mixed, leaving open the possibility of two potential confounds in research on the benefits of intellectual humility: people who are high in intellectual humility might have different ideological beliefs or might be less polarized than those who are lower in intellectual humility. In the current research, we address this concern in a large, pre-registered, and systematic analysis of nine samples (N = 3,248). We find that IH is generally unassociated with the strength of people’s political belief but is reliably associated with a more liberal political orientation. We discuss implications of these findings for research in this domain.

KEYWORDS:

• Intellectual humility
• political orientation
• affective polarization
• strength of political belief

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data for this work is publically available at the OSF page included earlier in the manuscript.

Open scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badges for Open Data, Open Materials and Preregistered. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://osf.io/mbwq4/?view_only=c825f379019f4423bd464f8154324af8.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2024.2352739.

Notes

1. These studies differed in their scales and samples. Hodge et al. (2019) used the Religious Intellectual Humility scale in a student sample. Leary and colleagues used the General Intellectual Humility scale in Qualtrics panels. Porter and Schumann (2018) used the Intellectual Humility scale in MTurk samples. Bowes et al. (2022) used the General Intellectual Humility and the Comprehensive Intellectual Humility scales in MTurk samples. Jongman-Sereno et al. (2023) used the General Intellectual Humility Scale in a community sample. Krumrei-Mancuso and Newman (2020, 2021) used an adapted version of the Comprehensive Intellectual Humility scale in an MTurk sample.

2. We preregistered that we would analyze 10 samples. However, after preregistering we learned that one sample did not include the measures of interest.

3. The phrasing for the items in Sample 7 and 8 differed slightly from the others, in that they were adapted to be more state focused (e.g. ‘I am open to questioning my opinions, positions, and viewpoints because they could be wrong’).

4. Our measure of strength of political belief had a small but significant correlation with more liberal political orientation in Sample A (r = −.10, p < .001). This implies that the liberal participants in our sample were slightly stronger in their beliefs than were the conservatives. However, adding strength of political belief as a covariate to the political orientation model did not change the association with IH (p < .001).

5. While political conviction was unassociated with political orientation (r = −.05, p = .488), political moralization was correlated with more liberal political orientation in Sample B (r = −.18, p = .006). Adding political moralization as a covariate to the political orientation model did not change the level of significance with IH (p = .089).

6. We preregistered that we would standardize all items at the combined sample level. For clarity we report both unstandardized and standardized regression coefficients.

7. We mistakenly preregistered that we would be including a random slope instead of a random intercept.

8. Also supporting this possibility, an examination of the inter-item correlations with the GIHS in Sample A revealed that all individual GIHS items were correlated with a more liberal political orientation except for the most other-focused item (‘I recognize the value in opinions that are different from my own’; r = −.004).

Additional information

Funding

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under [Grant No. 1917920].