Measuring intellectual humility through situated behavior: An alternative to dispositional self-reports

Area of Science:

• Psychology
• Metacognition
• Cross-cultural Psychology

Background:

• Psychological theory posits behavior results from person-situation interaction.
• Traditional metacognition measurement often uses abstract, situation-free self-perceptions.
• This disconnect limits understanding of dynamic self-regulatory processes.

Purpose of the Study:

• To introduce and validate a situated measurement approach for metacognitive constructs.
• To use intellectual humility (IH) as a proof-of-concept for this situated method.
• To demonstrate how IH measurement can align with interactionist psychological frameworks.

Main Methods:

• Developed a situated approach using event reconstruction of recent disagreements.
• Employed branching binary probes to assess specific behaviors in context.
• Validated the method across diverse populations in North America and rural Honduras.

Main Results:

• Demonstrated cross-cultural coherence of intellectual humility (IH).
• Revealed substantial within-person variability (74-81%) in IH expression.
• Identified significant situational influences of epistemic context and partner status on IH.

Conclusions:

• The situated approach effectively measures metacognitive constructs like IH across diverse cultures.
• This method overcomes the humility paradox by capturing situational fluctuations.
• Proposed four principles for aligning measurement with interactionist psychological theory.