Both trait and situation in intellectual humility
We have been discussing intellectual humility as a trait with a certain expectation that, as a trait, it is fairly stable; that is, it will determine a person’s behavior in most situations, except for some kind of reasonable response to changing circumstances.
This gives us a basis by which we can describe a person as intellectually humble and so, depending on the efficacy of the measure used to determine whether or not any given person has what it takes to be intellectually humble, once we have made such a determination we might also have a basis on which to predict their behavior. We may even be able to correlate intellectual humility with some important life outcomes, especially in the interpersonal realm, like has been done with other traits like the Big 5 (Ozer and Benet-Martinez 2006).There is some controversy in the field of social and personality psychology about the power of personality traits to influence behavior. People are not consistent in their behavior across situations (Fleeson 2004). For example, a person at wedding reception A is observed going from table to table, greeting each guest, laughing, and generally being the life of the party, while that same person, at wedding reception B is observed sitting alone most of the time, talking only to a handful of people.What is the difference? At wedding A he is the father of the bride and the “host” of the party. At wedding B he is a guest at the wedding of a distant relative and knows hardly anyone. Is this person an introvert or an extrovert? The answer is: it depends.The situation seems to be the determining factor. Or, to return to the example of the caricature of the arrogant philosopher: does philosophy attract people with intellectual arrogance or do the situations that philosophers are routinely found in call for the expression of that trait? What is important to study is not how traits make people behave in a certain way, but how people’s perceptions of situations and their reactions to them make people behave in a certain way (Fleeson 2004, Funder 2010).
We would describe such an approach as “interactionist,” which recognizes that situations do have great influence in determining behavior but that the truth is that both come into play. Fleeson (2004) provides an apt description of the interactionist approach:The same person changes his or her behavior quite rapidly and frequently, presumably in response to changing situation... Although this within-person variance is large and presumably due to individuals adapting to situations, it is possible that individuals adapt such that they nonetheless maintain their relative position compared with others in the same situations.
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There have been recent studies that take this interactionist approach to intellectual humility that have yielded fruitful insight. We highlight a few here.
Since the study of intellectual humility is still in its early stages, the first tasks in these investigations is to create measures of traits that are related to intellectual humility and then test them in different situations.Victor Ottati and his colleagues (Price et al. 2015; Ottati et al. 2015) have developed a trait measure for Open Minded Cognition which they describe as a “cognitive style. marked by a willingness to consider a variety of intellectual perspectives, values, attitudes, opinions or beliefs; even those that contradict the individual’s prior opinion” (Price et al. 2015, p. 3).They take an interactionist approach, conceiving of Open Minded Cognition as comprised of both trait-like (dispositional) and situational components. Therefore, an individual’s average level of open-mindedness across situations would be indicative of“an individual’s chronic level of open-mindedness” (p. 5). By the same token, situations may merit increased or decreased levels of open-mindedness, depending on the reaction the situation demands. Price et al. (2015) explore open-minded cognition in three conditions: general open-minded cognition (OMC- G), political open-minded cognition (OMC-P), and religious open-minded cognition (OMC- R).They developed a measure to test for each.The six items of the measure are nearly identical.
Three assess a person’s openness to different or new opinions, arguments, and viewpoints, and three assess a person’s resistance or “closedness” to arguments, ideas, or messages, especially those with which they disagree. The difference is the political measure inserts the word “political” before the words argument, ideas, opinions, etc., and the religious measure inserts the word “religious,” while the general measure has no qualifier (e.g. I try to reserve judgment until I have a chance to hear arguments from both sides of an [political/religious] issue).The evidence for trait expression in different situations in this study comes from the differential correlations of the three measures with other trait measures. For example, the general and political scales show a significant negative correlation with dogmatism, but the religious scale does not, whereas the religious scale correlates significantly with humility, while the other scales do not. A similar pattern is shown in relation to the Conscientiousness, Neuroticism, and Agreeableness subscales of the Big 5. All three measures correlate with three of the four subscales of Stanovitch and West’s (2007) measure of Active Open-Minded Thinking, but only the political measure correlates with the “counter-factual thinking” subscale. From these results we see that across individuals, different contexts tap different kinds of characteristics and traits. Moreover, their results show that, within individuals, a person can have a high level of Open- Minded Cognition in one area, for example, politics, while having a low level in another, like religion.
Ottati and his colleagues (Ottati, Wilson and Price 2016) further examined the interaction of disposition and situation in Open-Minded Cognition.They constructed a model, called the Flexible Merit Standard Model, that can account for both disposition and situation in the expression of Open-Minded Cognition. They surmised that in any given situation, a person determines how much Open-Minded Cognition is merited, that is, across situations the standard by which one should be open-minded is flexible.
That determination, of course, is influenced by how chronically open-minded that person is across situations. Therefore, the Flexible Merit Standard Model accounts for a trait x situation interaction in the expression of Open- Minded Cognition. From the results of this study they report:Clearly, both dispositional and situational forces are at play when individuals adopt a particular level of Open-Mindedness in a specific situation. In many situations, the dispositional and situational forces function as separate and independent sources of norm activation that produce additive effects (Additive Postulate). In some situations, however, individuals high in dispositional Open-Mindedness may be more responsive to the situation than individuals low in dispositional Open-Mindedness (Discerning Open-Mindedness Postulate).
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Ottati et al. (2015) call this the “Joint Influence Hypothesis” and it confirms what Fleeson (2004) and others have asserted that neither dispositional tendencies or situation forces are adequate in explaining a person's behavior at any given time, but it is the interaction of the two in specific contexts that will determine how a person acts and reacts.This is an especially important insight for intellectual humility. As Price et al. (2015) show, there are differences even within a person depending on whether the situation is politics or religion. Knowing how important the interaction of situation and personality to human encounters could help us develop more civil ways of discourse, especially in politics and religion.
Mark Leary, Rick Hoyle, and their colleagues (Leary et al. 2015; Hoyle et al. 2016) took a similar interactionist approach to their study of intellectual humility. First, they devised and tested a general measure of intellectual humility (Leary et al. 2015) and tested it in a variety of situations. They wondered how intellectually humble people would act in a situation of disagreement (e.g. religion and politics).
In one of their studies (Leary et al. 2015), they sorted the participants into two groups, those scoring low on their general intellectual humility scale and those who scored high.They then determined how religious individuals were within those two groups. Finally, participants were randomly assigned to read one of three essays on the effects of religion on individuals and society, one pro-religious, one anti-religious, and one offering a balanced view. Participants then rated how much they agreed with the essay, the accuracy of the beliefs of the writer, the impression they had of the writer on a number ofpersonal qualities (e.g. warm or cold, moral or immoral), how they felt while reading the essay, and finally, answered a question on religion's effect on society on a positive to negative scale and how certain they were about their own personal religious views.They found that the higher people scored in the intellectual humility measure, the less certain they were of their views and the less they thought their views were superior to others. Moreover, though the majority of participants disagreed with the anti-religious essay, only those high in intellectual humility were more open to it.They preferred the balanced view and not those that were one-sided. The other situation they examined was people's reaction to politicians who change their minds. Those high in intellectual humility were more willing to vote for a candidate who changed positions on an issue than those who were low in intellectual humility.Hoyle et al. (2015) hypothesized that people will be less intellectually humble the more specific the issue.Thus, while a person might be intellectually humble about politics in general, they may not be as intellectually humble about gun control, and may show even less intellectual humility about background checks for gun purchases.They found that, while there was a modest overlap between a person's scores on the general intellectual humility measure and the measures of specific intellectual humility, the correlation did not necessarily weaken as the issues became more specific. However, what they did find was that the more extreme a person's view on a specific issue (the more the strongly agreed or disagreed with an issue, such as “physician- assisted suicide should be legal in all states,” the lower their specific intellectual humility. They also found that the method by which people came to their views had an impact on specific intellectual humility. Those whose opinions were formed by their own exploration and study were less intellectually humble than those who formed opinions by other means (e.g. from experts, anecdotal evidence, non-experts, “gut feelings,” common knowledge, common sense, religious teachings, emotions, or evaluating facts and reasoning carefully).
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