Intellectual Humility Links to Metacognitive Ability
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Intellectual humility is increasingly recognized as an epistemic virtue that helps foster truth-seeking, encourage compromise, and mitigate polarization. Yet, the current body of evidence grapples with a striking contradiction: The prevailing theoretical account suggests that intellectual humility hinges on metacognitive ability—the capacity to introspect on one’s own accuracy which manifests in assigning due confidence to the varying accuracy of one’s accuracy. However, empirical research testing this metacognitive ability account of intellectual humility has yielded inconsistent results. Here, we introduce a cognitive science approach informed by Signal Detection Theory, allowing for a more nuanced separation of metacognitive ability from correlated but distinct concepts (i.e., confidence and accuracy). We conduct a survey study among a national US sample (N = 999) involving the interpretation of one of the most heavily contested domains—climate change—lending itself for an investigation into how intellectual humility relates to cognitive processes in domains where it is most needed. We presented participants with summaries of fictitious studies on renewable energy, followed by 2-alternative forced choice questions to assess their accuracy and confidence. Results showed that firstly, more intellectually humble citizens were more accurate at discerning correct from incorrect interpretations of the presented evidence. Secondly, more intellectually humble citizens exhibited a heightened capacity to adjust their confidence levels to the varying accuracy of their evidence interpretations–indicating higher metacognitive ability—and this association was robust to accounting for their superior accuracy, and other preregistered covariates. And thirdly, in contrast to intuitive notions, more intellectually humble citizens did not exhibit lower metacognitive bias, the inclination to report lower (vs. higher) overall confidence. By highlighting the role of metacognitive ability in intellectual humility, the current study delivers empirical evidence for the ancient notion that epistemic virtues are linked to metacognitive ability.
