Intellectual humility as a character trait
The recent interest in studying virtues and character has been inspired by the positive psychology movement, but largely informed by the methods and approach of personality psychology.
Peterson and Seligman (2004) in their seminal work Character Strengths and Virtues declare “the stance we take toward character is in the spirit of personality psychology and specifically trait theory” (p. 10). In their conception, virtues are core characteristics that are universally valued across cultures (wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, and transcendence) whereas character strengths (traits) are “the psychological ingredients — processes or mechanisms — that define the virtues” (p.13). Personality psychology defines a trait as an attribute of a person that is relatively long-lasting and stable (Funder 2010). Philosophers use similar language about character traits defining them as “relatively long-term stable disposition to act in distinctive ways” (Harman 1999).The key to the definition is that these characteristics, traits, and dispositions are expressed over the long term and are relatively stable across situations (Funder 2010).Personality psychologists are interested in individual differences between people regarding the relative expression of traits. In this way the studies are often comparative, measuring how much a given trait influences an individual’s thought and behavior compared to others who share the same trait. For example, when measured on the Big 5 personality traits (extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness), individuals show high or low levels of each trait relative to other people. Each trait is orthogonal; that is, a high or low score on any one trait does not influence the score on the other traits (McCrea and Costa 1987). Intellectual humility may, or may not, work in the same way.
It may also have orthogonal characteristics relative to other character traits such that, for example, being high in intellectual humility may not impact how high or low a person is in courage or persistence. However, as with the Big 5, some character traits and virtues may show some kind of correlative relationship. For example, just as people who score low on neuroticism often score high on agreeableness and conscientiousness (Funder 2010), those high in intellectual humility may be high in forgiveness or prudence. It is also possible that intellectual humility may have different characteristics than personality traits, especially in regards to how to measure it or in the relative comparison of the trait between people. Unlike personality traits, it may have a moral standard to which it can be compared (per Miller 2014).We take no position as to if or how character strengths and virtues are distinct from personality traits, our initial interest is simply to understand the unknown (intellectual humility, a virtue with trait-like qualities) by comparison with the known (personality traits).In this spirit, there may also be correlations between intellectual humility and existing traits related to information seeking, curiosity, and other epistemic pursuits. In this section, we highlight them in more detail: the need for cognition, (Cacioppo and Petty 1982), the need for closure (Kruglanski 1990), those traits from factor models of personality that relate to intellectual humility (The Big 5, HEXACO, and the Big 2), and the role of emotion and cognition.
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