Intellectual humility (IH)—the ability to recognize the fallibility and limits of our knowledge—has a potentially crucial impact on learning and is particularly important given the polarization of beliefs engendered by the information age. However, it is currently difficult to develop programs aimed at fostering IH as we still know little about how intellectual humility develops across childhood, and more generally across the lifespan.
This multi-site collaborative project will set a foundation for a developmental science of IH by developing a self-report measure of IH with desirable psychometric properties that can measure trait intellectual humility in 6- to 10-year-old children and that has been evaluated in multiple contexts.
The first phase of the project will focus on developing a self-report measure of IH that can measure trait intellectual humility in 6- to 10-year-old children. The second phase of the project will distribute a number of smaller grants to researchers outside our group who will use our measure as part of their own projects investigating the development of IH. This effort will provide crucial information about the psychometric properties of the new IH scale and its generalizability, allowing for further refinement.
In addition to providing a comprehensive measure of intellectual humility in childhood that will make future research into its development possible, these projects will provide preliminary information about variability in IH and its developmental trajectory in early childhood. In sum, this project will provide a solid foundation on which to build a developmental science of Intellectual Humility.
