Knowing what you know: Intellectual humility and judgments of recognition memory

Abstract

This study examined the relationship between recognition memory and intellectual humility, the degree to which people recognize that their personal beliefs are fallible. Participants completed the General Intellectual Humility Scale, an incidental old/new recognition task, and a task that assessed the tendency to over-claim one's knowledge. Signal detection analyses showed that higher intellectual humility was associated with higher discriminability between old and new items, regardless of whether the items were congruent or incongruent with participants' own beliefs. However, intellectual humility was not related to response bias, indicating that intellectually arrogant people were not biased to claim that they knew everything. Together, the findings support a relationship between intellectual humility and performance on memory tasks, indicating that individual differences in intellectual humility may partly reflect how people process information and judge what they do and do not know.