Overconfident and unaware: Intellectual humility and the calibration of metacognition

ABSTRACT

Two studies examined whether Intellectual Humility moderates the Dunning-Kruger Effect – the tendency of those with little relative knowledge/expertise to overclaim their ability. In study 1, participants completed a measure of intellectual humility and were asked to predict their relative performance prior to a test of fluid intelligence, and then their actual performance was compared to their initial prediction and ranked relative to the other performances. Low performers tended to over-estimate their performance (i.e., the Dunning-Kruger effect), but less intellectually humble people demonstrated a greater susceptibility to this effect. Intellectual humility was unrelated to actual performance. These results were replicated in study 2, with a test of general knowledge in place of problem-solving ability. Additionally, in Study 2 more measures of intellectual humility were added to clarify potential relationships. Implications are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Cognition
• virtue
• bias
• metacognition
• intellectual humility

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The power analyses for our calibration analyses for the IH total scores assume that the probability of H₀ = 0.50 and that participants’ confidence in their answers accounts for approximately 5% of the variance in each score. The power analyses for the calibration analyses for the IH subscales assume that confidence, the other subscales, and their interactions account for approximately 25–50% of the variance in each subscale.