Consolidating the measurement of intellectual humility: The Collected Intergroup Intellectual Humility (CIIH) scale

• DOI: 10.31234/osf.io/ug756_v1
• Publication Date: 2025-03-30T17:13:54Z
• Authors: Philip Pärnamets; Jay Joseph Van Bavel; Mark Alfano

Intellectual virtues such as intellectual humility are dispositions to seek out and respond to evidence and the testimony of others in ways that are conducive to the acquisition, maintenance, and transmission of knowledge. In recent years there has been a growth of interest in this topic, with the development of ten different scales designed to capture individual differences in intellectual humility and related constructs. In a series of ten studies (N = 5,922), we analyze the psychometric properties of these measures to consolidate them into a single inventory with five subscales (open-mindedness, sense of intellectual superiority, intellectual defensiveness, intellectual arrogance, and tendency to criticize one’s ingroup). Given the importance of intellectual humility in intergroup relations, we intentionally include items designed to capture the presence (or lack) of intellectual humility in an intergroup context. These items allow us to capture distinct aspects of intellectual humility where people remain open-minded about the perspectives of outgroup members or turn a critical eye to the beliefs and reasoning of ingroup members. Our new inventory — the Collected Intergroup Intellectual Humility scale (CIIH) — demonstrates good convergent and discriminant validity, as well as the power to predict a range of important outcome variables such as acceptance/rejection of warranted/unwarranted conspiracy theories, medical (mis)information, and (fake) news, as well as to update credences in light of social feedback. CIIH offers strong psychometric properties and greater utility than existing measures for assessing the willingness to learn from a wide variety of individuals and groups. Our results suggest that the disposition to criticize oneself and the disposition to criticize one’s ingroup are distinct.