Intellectual humility and personality: The Big 2
A recent development in personality and social psychology is a growing discernment of the importance of two main dimensions that are useful in guiding the description of personality traits, how those traits are perceived and judged in individuals, groups, and cultures: namely, agency and communion (Abele and Wojciszke 2007).
Sometimes called the “Big Two” (Abele and Wojciszke 2013; Bruckmuller and Abele 2013), they are based on two “fundamental modes of existence” (Bakan 1966) that reflect two intuitive categories of social information processing: perspectives on the self and perspectives of other people. Thus, agency is related to what Able and Wojciszke (2007) call the “goal-pursuit of the self,” while communion is related to “consideration of others” (p. 751). Each is identified by their differential focus, that is, agency as individual striving with its dimensions of competence, instrumentality, and power, and communion as social relatedness characterized by warmth, morality, expressiveness, and affiliation (Abele and Wojciszke 2013). These two categories can also be used as themes to organize the Big 5 traits with agency reflecting the personal growth dimensions of the traits (Extraversion and Intellect) and communion reflecting the socialization dimensions (Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Emotional Stability, Digman 1997).Since agency is characterized by pursuing personal goals and exhibiting skills and accomplishments (traits such as competence, intellectual goodness, or dominance); and communion is related to forming and maintaining social connections (traits such as warmth, morality, social goodness, or nurturance, Bruckmnller and Abele 2013), intellectual humility, with its epistemic and social dimensions might fall in with either dimension of the Big Two. The intellectual dimension, with its focus on the pursuit of truth, might align it more on the agentic side, while the social dimension, with its emphasis on the social skills required for collaborative pursuit of knowledge, might land it more on the communal side (Samuelson et al.
2014).Gregg, Mahadevan, and Sedikides (2017) used a cross-sectional design to examine patterns of relations that might occur between agency and communion on the one hand, and measures of intellectual arrogance and intellectual humility on the other.They operationalized communion (C) and agency (A) on three different levels: socially, as inclusion (C) and status (A); disposition- ally, as warmth (C) and competence (A), and behaviorally, as amiability (C) and assertiveness (A) using self-report scales and items developed in previous research. Intellectual humility and intellectual arrogance were measured by novel instruments developed by the researchers. They found that the higher an individual’s communal traits were (inclusion, warmth, and amiability) the more that person exhibited aspects of intellectual humility (were more rationally objective), while the opposite was true for those with higher agentic traits (they were less rationally objective). In addition, the higher an individual scored on the measures of agency, the more an individual showed a tendency toward intellectual arrogance (higher BIAS scores).Their conclusion was that high agency and low communion predicts high intellectual arrogance.
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