Is intellectual humility related to more accuracy and less overconfidence?

ABSTRACT

Is intellectual humility (IH) related to more accuracy and less overconfidence in decision-making contexts? Here we sought to answer this question and clarify ambiguities in the literature by examining the relations among IH, critical thinking, and overconfidence measures. We assessed these relations in both online community and college participants. Overall, IH tended to be related to more accuracy on a range of critical thinking measures and to less overestimation and overclaiming. We also found some evidence for a Dunning-Kruger effect (i.e. those scoring the lowest on IH significantly overestimated their performance). Results tended to be significantly stronger in the online community participants than in the college participants, and the Dunning-Kruger effect was not present in the college sample. Overall, the current findings invite questions about how IH contributes to more accuracy and less overconfidence and whether IH can be leveraged to bolster critical thinking.

KEYWORDS:

• Intellectual humility
• critical thinking
• overconfidence
• Dunning-Kruger effect
• humility

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the late Dr. Scott O. Lilienfeld for his contributions to this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability

The first-author was responsible for study conceptualization, data collection, data preparation, data analyses, and report writing. The second-author was responsible for data preparation and data analyses. The third-author was responsible for study conceptualization and report writing.

Open scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badges for Open Data and Open Materials through Open Practices Disclosure. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2023.2208100

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2023.2208100.

Notes

1. Due to a computer error, one item was left out of the AIHS and the subdimension of Modesty: ‘I wouldn’t want people to treat me as though I were intellectually superior to them’.

2. Due to an error, one of the ‘real’ items was not included in the survey battery in Sample 3 (31 ‘real’ and 13 ‘foil’ items).

3. To further probe potential differences across samples, we conducted three subsidiary analyses. First, we examined age as a moderator in the relations between IH and critical thinking and overconfidence in the online community sample. Of 79 analyses, 18 (23%) were significant. Of these significant results, all indicated that the relations between IH and critical thinking and overconfidence were stronger in younger than in older participants. We also covaried for education in the relations between IH and critical thinking and overconfidence in the community sample. IH accounted for an average 1–2% of the variance in critical thinking and overconfidence over-and-above education. Finally, we examined the correlations between IH and critical thinking and overconfidence in college-aged participants in the online community sample (age of 26 or younger). The correlations in this subsample were larger than the correlations in the student sample. Put differently, the results broadly mirrored the correlations in the larger online community sample rather than the college sample (Supplemental Table 9). All results are available in online supplemental materials.

4. Consistent with Leman et al. (2021), we also examined overestimation using a one-way ANOVA and follow-up Bonferroni-adjusted contrasts. These results are available in Supplemental Materials 5.