Developing and Validating a Measure of Intellectual Humility in Traditional Villages of Rural Honduras

Intellectual humility (IH) has emerged as an important construct with particular relevance to many aspects of core human virtues. But efforts to study IH in non-Western contexts and to explore the relevance of IH to various practical decisions that people make in their everyday lives are still scarce. Here, using a sample drawn from our ongoing study of 30,862 people in 176 villages in rural Honduras, we will address this gap. Moreover, we will exploit a very unusual feature of our field site, namely, the experimental introduction of novel health practices, in order to evaluate the role of IH in the adoption of exogenously introduced innovations. With this cohort, we are now beginning to explore whether prosociality demonstrated in behavioral economic games is related to evidence of collective wellbeing. We are using a randomly chosen subset of 3,520 people who would be the participants in the work proposed here. At the collective level, we plan to examine how overall levels of cooperation, for example, are related to village-level measures of wellbeing. At the individual level, we plan to link the experimental data with previously collected survey data in the same villages to study the relationship between people’s social network position and their propensity to cooperate. Here, we propose to add IH measures to this initiative that already involves the collection of this rich data. The end result is that we will have well-honed measures of IH in a traditionally living rural population on which we have social network, cooperation, and health-related data. Most importantly, we will have data on changes in health knowledge and behavior across time indicative of openness to new ideas, practices, and norms, which we can examine for their relationships to IH, thus broadly examining the potential importance of IH in the acquisition of knowledge important to the wellbeing of individuals and communities.