How Intellectually Humble Are You?
Knowing that you might be wrong, and acting like it
Intellectual humility is not low self-esteem and not a lack of opinions. It is the ability to hold your views firmly enough to act on them while staying aware that some of them are wrong - you just do not know which ones. Research has found four parts to it, and most people are strong on one or two: they change their mind easily but look down on opponents, or respect everyone but never admit an error.
Before you start There are no right answers. Pick what is usually true for you, not what sounds best.
Think of real disagreements from the last year - at work, at home, online - rather than how you would like to behave in one.
What it measures
The four factors of the Comprehensive Intellectual Humility Scale: keeping your ego apart from your ideas, openness to revising your views, respect for other people's viewpoints, and a lack of intellectual overconfidence. It is about how you relate to your own knowledge - different from general modesty and fairness, which the honesty-humility test covers, and from enjoying hard thinking, which is need for cognition.
Based on: Comprehensive Intellectual Humility Scale (Krumrei-Mancuso & Rouse, 2016) and intellectual humility research (Leary et al., 2017)
Possible results
Ego apart from ideas
Whether criticism of your views feels like criticism of you.
Openness to revising
Whether good evidence actually changes your mind.
Respect for other views
Whether you can disagree with someone and still take them seriously.
No overconfidence
Whether your certainty matches what you actually know.
Common questions
Is intellectual humility the same as low self-confidence?
No. It is about the fit between how sure you are and how much you actually know. Secure people can be very intellectually humble, and insecure people often cling to their views precisely because being wrong feels threatening. Leary's research linked intellectual humility to curiosity, tolerance of ambiguity and low dogmatism, not to low confidence.
How is it different from honesty-humility?
Honesty-humility, from the HEXACO model, is about general modesty, fairness and not chasing status or money you have not earned. Intellectual humility is narrower: it concerns your beliefs and how you handle being wrong. Someone can be modest about their achievements and still be completely sure of every opinion they hold.
Does changing your mind make you look weak?
It depends partly on who is watching. In Leary's studies, people high in intellectual humility were less inclined to see a politician who changed position as flip-flopping, so how a change of mind is judged says something about the audience too. Explaining what new evidence changed your view usually makes it read as strength rather than drift.
Can intellectual humility be learned?
Probably to some degree, but the evidence is still thin. What seems to help is practical: settings where being wrong is not punished, the habit of saying how sure you are before checking, and seeking out the strongest version of the opposing case. Whether any of this changes the underlying trait over years has not been well tested.
Sources
- Krumrei-Mancuso, E. J., & Rouse, S. V. (2016). The development and validation of the Comprehensive Intellectual Humility Scale. Journal of Personality Assessment. doi:10.1080/00223891.2015.1068174
- Leary, M. R., Diebels, K. J., Davisson, E. K., Jongman-Sereno, K. P., Isherwood, J. C., Raimi, K. T., Deffler, S. A., & Hoyle, R. H. (2017). Cognitive and interpersonal features of intellectual humility. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. doi:10.1177/0146167217697695
An honest note The statements are Quinthea's own wording, adapted from the four factors of the Comprehensive Intellectual Humility Scale, so your scores cannot be compared with published norms. Measuring humility by self-report has an obvious weakness: the least humble people may rate themselves the most humble, and researchers still debate how well questionnaires capture it. Most of the research comes from the United States, and what counts as respectful disagreement varies a great deal between cultures.
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