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A cross-cultural assessment of the semantic dimensions of intellectual humility

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Abstract

Intellectual humility can be broadly construed as being conscious of the limits of one’s existing knowledge and capable of acquiring more knowledge, which makes it a key virtue of the information age. However, the claim “I am (intellectually) humble” seems paradoxical in that someone who has the disposition in question would not typically volunteer it. Therefore, measuring intellectual humility via self-report may be methodologically unsound. As a consequence, we suggest analyzing intellectual humility semantically, using a psycholexical approach that focuses on both synonyms and antonyms of ‘intellectual humility’. We present a thesaurus-based methodology to map the semantic space of intellectual humility and the vices it opposes as a heuristic to support analysis and diagnosis of this disposition. We performed the mapping both in English and German in order to test for possible cultural differences in the understanding of intellectual humility. In both languages, we find basically the same three semantic dimensions of intellectual humility (sensibility, unpretentiousness, and knowledge dimensions) as well as three dimensions of its related vices (self-overrating, other-underrating and dogmatism dimensions). The resulting semantic clusters were validated in an empirical study with English (n = 276) and German (n = 406) participants. We find medium-to-high correlations (0.54–0.72) between thesaurus similarity and perceived similarity, and we can validate the three dimensions identified in the study. But we also find limitations of the thesaurus methodology in terms of cluster plausibility. We conclude by discussing the importance of these findings for constructing psychometric measures of intellectual humility via self-report vs. computer models.

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Notes

  1. Interestingly, Galton (1884) used Roget’s thesaurus as a source, but since then almost all psycholexical research has used the dictionary.

  2. We used the LEO online dictionary, one of the largest and most popular German–English dictionaries (http://dict.leo.org).

  3. A distance measure has to fulfill the triangle inequality, i.e., \(d\left(a,b\right)+d(b,c)\ge d(a,c)\), where \(d(a,b)\) stands for the distance between points \(a\) and \(b\). This inequality is violated by our measure \(S({t}^{1},{t}^{2})\). In the following, we use the term “dissimilarity” to denote \(1-S({t}^{1},{t}^{2})\) in the original space, whereas on the map, we use the term “distance”, as we refer to the Euclidean distance of points on the two-dimensional plane.

  4. For philosophical views, see Alfano (2016, Chap. 5), Moody-Adams, (1997), and Wong (2006). For psychological views, see Fischer et al. (2010) and Shweder (2012).

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Acknowledgements

We thank Daniel Lapsley, ACE Collegiate Professor and Chair of the Department of Psychology of the University of Notre Dame, and Paul C. Stey, Department of Psychology of the University of Notre Dame, for their input to this research. This work was made possible through a grant from the Thrive Center at Fuller Theological Seminary.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Biomedical Ethics and History of Medicine, University of Zurich, Winterthurerstrasse 30, 8006, Zurich, Switzerland

    Markus Christen

  2. Faculty of Ethics and Philosophy of Technology, Delft University of Technology, Jaffalaan 5, 2628 BX, Delft, The Netherlands

    Mark Alfano

  3. Department of History, Political Science and Philosophy, Texas A&M University-Kingsville, Kingsville, TX, 78363, USA

    Brian Robinson

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  1. Markus Christen
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Correspondence to Markus Christen.

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Christen, M., Alfano, M. & Robinson, B. A cross-cultural assessment of the semantic dimensions of intellectual humility. AI & Soc 34, 785–801 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-017-0791-7

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