Intellectual humility and personality: The Big 5
Considering intellectual humility within the framework of conceptions of personality such as the Five-Factor Model (The Big Five, McCrae and Costa 1987, 1997) and the HEXACO (Lee and Ashton 2004) leads in a promising direction.
We can imagine that high levels of the Openness to Experience factor might correlate with high intellectual humility, especially when we look at specific facets of the Openness construct.The facet “openness to ideas,” for example, seems to capture an element of curiosity we would expect to find in the intellectually humble; the “values” facet might figure into whether someone is willing to really consider an opposing political or religious view with charity. Similar corollaries of intellectual humility might exist within some facets of Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and even Emotional Stability.Along these lines, special attention might be given to the HEXACO model of personality which adds the dimension of Honesty-Humility (H) to the factors mentioned above (Ashton and Lee 2005).A connection between the H dimension and socially important criteria such as sincerity, fairness, and modesty has already been demonstrated (Ashton and Lee 2008). Additionally, the H factor has been negatively correlated with particularly vicious personality traits (e.g.: narcissism, psychopathy, Machiavellianism, materialism, and power-seeking) that we would expect to find somewhere opposite of intellectual humility (Ashton and Lee 2005, 2007): a finding which lends some support to the understanding of intellectual humility as involving a lack of concern for one's status. Not surprisingly, the H factor has also been used to show that the trait of humility is linked to higher social relationship quality (Peters, Rowatt and Johnson 2011).
Despite these helpful leads in the personality literature, it seems important to avoid oversimplified association of intellectual humility with certain personality traits. Even traits that seem to track with intellectual humility could have their own special hazards.
For example, a trait like Openness could easily be an impediment to intellectual virtue if it leads to a kind of non-committal intellectual paralysis. And a person scoring high in Agreeableness might be too compromising, sacrificing intellectual honesty for likability.As the psychology of intellectual humility is developing, various measures and constructs of intellectual humility are being tested against the Big 5 and the HEXACO in order to assess construct validity. Because of its epistemic dimension, Openness to Experience is often shown to correlate with measures of intellectual humility. Tenelle Porter (2015) tested her measure of intellectual humility with two different samples of adults and found significant correlations ranging from.26 to.40 with Openness to Experience. She also found significant correlations in both samples between her measure and Agreeableness and Conscientiousness, and in one sample with Extraversion. Krumrei-Mancuso and Rouse (2016), using a slightly different measure for Openness, also found a robust correlation between their measure of general intellectual humility and Openness (.40). They did not measure other constructs from the Big 5 but did find significant correlations between intellectual humility and general humility, open-mindedness, and tolerance. Price et al. (2015) tested their construct of “Open-Minded Cognition,” a key component of intellectual humility, and found significant positive correlations with a variety of personality traits including openness to experience, agreeableness, emotional stability (the obverse of neuroticism) and conscientiousness. Leary et al. (2015) also found positive correlations with openness, along with measures of epistemic curiosity, and existential quest.
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