Intellectual Humility and Reactions to Opinions about Religious Beliefs

Abstract

Intellectual humility, a recognition of the fallibility of one's own views and an openness to changing those views when warranted, is a construct with roots in philosophy that is only now beginning to receive attention from psychological scientists. We focus on intellectual humility in the domain of religious belief and conduct an initial test of the hypothesis that the influence of religious beliefs on evaluations of written opinions about religious matters is moderated by intellectual humility. We find that our ad hoc measure of intellectual humility in the religious domain is best characterized in terms of four correlated dimensions, allowing for focused tests of our hypothesis. We find some support for the hypothesis. Individuals with strong religious beliefs who are low in intellectual humility in the religion domain, regardless of dimension, react more strongly than their high humility counterparts to written opinions regarding religious beliefs—both opinions that support and contradict their own beliefs. Ancillary analyses show a moderate curvilinear relation between strength of religious beliefs and intellectual humility in the religion domain, with lower humility accompanying stronger views in favor of and against religious beliefs.