A preliminary investigation of intellectual humility as a protective factor for maladaptive personality traits

Abstract

Personality disorders are a major public health concern that onset during adolescence and young adulthood. There has been a recent interest in studying the role of positive psychology constructs in personality pathology. A positive psychology construct that has been tested in conjunction with normative personality traits, but not yet maladaptive personality traits, is intellectual humility (IH). Evaluating links between IH and maladaptive personality traits would advance prior research and could also inform new prevention and intervention strategies for personality pathology, as well as increase clinical applications for IH. The current study therefore aimed to examine associations between IH and the five maladaptive traits outlined in the Alternative Model of Personality Disorders from Section III of the DSM-5: negative affect, detachment, antagonism, disinhibition, and psychoticism. The sample included 897 young adults between the ages of 18–25 (79.8% female), who completed the five-factor Personality Inventory for DSM-5 and the three-factor Intellectual Humility Scale as part of a cross-sectional online study. Five hierarchical regression models were evaluated. All five maladaptive traits were significantly and inversely predicted by at least one of the three IH domains, over and above age and gender. Relative to the other maladaptive traits, antagonism had the greatest amount of variability explained (23.7%) by IH factors (compared to the 4–10% variance explained in the other traits). Clinical implications, particularly for personality disorders that involve antagonism, and future research directions are discussed.

Keywords:

• maladaptive personality traits
• intellectual humility
• positive psychology
• Personality Inventory for DSM-5
• young adults
• personality disorder

Disclosure statement

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

Notes

1 Numerous measures of IH have emerged in more recent years, many concurrent or subsequent to the one used in this study, and some of which are described in our literature review. Data collection began in 2017 for this study—before there were as many published measures of IH as there are today. However, we note that the study by Haggard et al. (2018) compared the Limitations-Owning Intellectual Humility scale with three other measures of IH: the measure by Hill et al. (2015) used herein, the Comprehensive Intellectual Humility Scale, and the General Intellectual Humility Scale. Haggard et al. (2018) determined that each measure provided a “consistent yet distinctive understanding of IH” (p. 192). The Hill et al. (2015) IHS scale demonstrated significant correlations of r = .48–.74 with the other three measures of IH.