Intellectual humility and religious convictions: when does virtue become vice?

ABSTRACT

Ballantyne’s call for ‘reality-orientedness’ as a core concept of intellectual humility (IH), though laudable, is too general to unify the field. Rather than pursuing an unlikely consensus, what will likely be more successful in moving the field forward will be greater clarity about how our culturally-based ideologies − discussed as ‘worldviews’ − shape the understanding, experience, and manifestation of IH. Failing to account for these differences, which has heretofore characterized much IH research, leads to problematic results in the existing IH empirical literature. The focus here is on religious worldviews, where the disregard of worldview is surprising given that humility, including intellectual humility, is consistently valued in major world religions. A worldview approach as a way forward for empirical research is illustrated by discussing how two religious/philosophical traditions − a theistic Christian tradition, and a Buddhist tradition − might conceptualize IH. Implications for measurement are discussed through an example of a theistic IH measure.

KEYWORDS:

• Character strengths
• culture
• faith, humility
• measurement

Disclosure statement

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