Intellectual Humility

An article recently published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin reported on investigations of what the researchers labelled Cognitive and Interpersonal Features of Intellectual Humility. It’s an interesting use of words and an interesting concept. So what is “intellectual humility?” First, confusion about what healthy and desirable exist, in part because the concept of humility has been perceived by some as unassertiveness, servility, lack of appropriate personal pride, submissiveness, and so on. Especially in developed countries, these words rarely are seen as representing desirable characteristics. Rather they describe a persona that, as one individual put it, “everything that I do not want to be.” The researchers set about to investigate “intellectual Humility: (so called) and the characteristics that describe it. More tomorrow.