Date of Graduation

8-2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology (PhD)

Degree Level

Graduate

Department

Psychological Science

Advisor/Mentor

Behrend, Douglas

Committee Member

Veilleux, Jennifer

Second Committee Member

Lampinen, James

Keywords

Intellectual humilty; Feedback; Development; Children

Abstract

Intellectual Humility (IH) is the ability to recognize, acknowledge, and act, on the fallibility of one’s own knowledge (Porter et al., 2021). IH is associated with many positive outcomes including intellectual curiosity, tenacity, open-mindedness, and mastery behaviors (Leary, 2018; Porter & Schuman, 2017, Porter et al., 2020) leading some to believe IH is the promotion of IH as the next great educational virtue. Some scholars argue however, that too much IH can lead to Intellectual Servility which is associated with negative outcomes such as maladaptive perfectionism, need for cognitive closure, and less willingness to change a belief when presented with new evidence (Battaly, 2022;Mcelroy-Heltzel et al., 2023). Currently, little is known about young children’s IH, whether children can be taught to display more IH, and whether children can have too much or too little intellectual humility. To address these questions, the current study used a novel behavioral task to assess children's (6 -10 years) IH. After establishing a baseline, children were randomly assigned to an encourage IH, discourage IH, or neutral feedback condition. Children were then given a post-feedback assessment to determine if the feedback had changed IH. General Hypothesis 1 predicted that IH scores would increase with encouraging feedback and decrease with discouraging feedback. This hypothesis was not supported. Although there was a significant difference between children’s baseline and post-feedback scores in the encourage condition this difference was not in the expected direction. Children’s baseline levels were also considered to determine whether children at risk for intellectual arrogance (low IH at baseline) and servility (high IH at baseline) can correct these extreme tendencies if provided feedback (Specific Hypotheses 1 and 2) or if their scores would become more extreme (Specific Hypotheses 3 and 4). Instead, regardless of feedback condition, children high in IH had a significant decrease in scores and children low in IH had a non-significant increase in scores. Children low in IH appear to be resistant to feedback while children high in IH are highly sensitive to feedback which raises important questions about teaching IH to children and the potential success of an IH intervention. This study provides important initial results for measuring children’s IH and understanding how it may change. This study can serve as the foundation for future projects that aim to explore applications of Intellectual Humility across multiple disciplines.

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