Are intellectually humble people aware of their reputation? An empirical investigation of the metaperception and meta-accuracy of intellectual humility.

Scholars conceive of intellectual humility (IH) as an accurate sense of one’s limitations and strengths. Presumably, awareness of one’s reputation concerning IH would be included in the epistemic domain, meaning those high in IH should realize that how they are perceived by others. These studies empirically test this conception of IH by using interpersonal perception paradigms originally designed to examine metaperceptions and meta-accuracy, or the extent to which people are aware of how they are perceived by others. If the current understanding of IH is accurate, then someone with high IH should have a more accurate impression of how intellectually humble other people perceive them to be. Combining IH, metaperception, and meta-accuracy allows a unique examination of the construct validity of self-reported measures of IH. In the reported studies, metaperceptions of IH were correlated with self-report, and moderated the relationship of self-report to other-report, as previously found in the literature. However, no relationship between self-reported IH and meta-accuracy was found- those claiming IH did not have accurate metaperceptions of how others view them. This finding is unaffected by length of acquaintance. This work extends the literature on meta-accuracy and person-perception more broadly by examining IH as a component of the individual differences in interpersonal perception.