“I Know That I Don’t Know Everything”: Validation of the General Intellectual Humility Scale in French

Abstract

Intellectual humility involves recognizing one’s own epistemic limitations and is associated with several beneficial outcomes. This work presents a French version of the General Intellectual Humility Scale (Leary et al., 2017) to investigate this concept in French-speaking populations. We translated the scale and, across five studies (NTotal = 2172), provide evidence of its structure (through EFA, CFA, internal consistency, test-retest reliability, and measurement invariance across French and English speakers) and the validity of its scores (convergent, divergent, and predictive). Study 1 showed that the scale related to need for evidence. Study 2 revealed that the scale (a) positively related to openness and need for cognition, (b) negatively related to dogmatism, and (c) had a negligible relationship with social desirability. In Study 3, scores predicted attention paid to the quality of persuasive arguments over and above need for closure. Study 4 showed that the scale correlated positively with another self-report measure of intellectual humility. A test-retest analysis also indicated adequate reliability for the French version of the scale. Finally, Study 5 tested measurement invariance and revealed that the structure of the scale was similar between French and English speakers and that their latent scores were comparable. Overall, this work offers evidence of the (French) General Intellectual Humility Scale as a valid measure of intellectual humility.