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

Traditional measurement approaches assume that metacognitive features like perspective-taking, open-mindedness, or intellectual humility manifest as stable dispositions. Focusing on intellectual humility (IH)—recognizing the limits of one’s knowledge and fallibility—we proposed an alternative situated approach, testing it across diverse populations: English- and Spanish-speaking North Americans (N=633) and adults from 136 rural Honduran villages (N=2,567). Participants recalled three recent disagreements from their lives–one freely chosen, one where they were wrong, one where they were right—and reported specific epistemic behaviors (e.g., careful listening, considering others’ views) through binary-chained probes to avoid numeric rating scales. This method revealed coherence of the IH construct across cultures, while varying substantially across situations. Most variance (74-81%) occurred within (vs. between) people across situations: heightened when recalling being wrong versus right and, in Honduras, when disagreeing with higher-status partners. Situational effects also fully explained gender differences in the Honduran sample. The situated approach showed efficiency outside Western and educated contexts and helps overcome the humility paradox—when least intellectually humble overclaim their humility while more humble individuals underestimate it. We discuss how the methodological principles we apply here—focus on behavioral expression of target characteristics in specific situations (vs. self-reports of one’s abstract tendencies), sampling from actual experiences (vs. hypothetical scenarios), decomposing numerical scales into binary-chain prompts to increase accessibility across diverse populations, and explicitly modelling intra-individual variability—offers a framework for assessing other metacognitive and self-regulatory constructs across diverse populations, beyond abstract dispositional self-views dominating psychological literature.