Does intellectual humility transmit intergenerationally? Examining relations between parent and child measures

People vary drastically in their intellectual humility (i.e., their ability to recognize gaps in their knowledge). Little is known about how intellectual humility develops or why some children might demonstrate more intellectual humility than others. The current study examines the possibility of parent to child transmission of intellectual humility. Parents (N = 108; 88% college graduates; 56% with household income over $100,000) of children ages 7 to 10 completed two primary measures of intellectual humility: a self-report measure (i.e., the Comprehensive Intellectual Humility Scale; Krumrei-Mancuso & Rouse, 2016), and a behavioral measure (i.e., the Prompted Explanation Task; Mills et al., 2022), which measured how often parents referenced knowledge limits or how to handle uncertainty. Separately, children (N = 108; M = 8.2 years; 51% girls, 49% boys; 70% White; 86% non-Hispanic) completed a knowledge estimation task where they rated their ability to answer explanatory questions about animals and vehicles. Contrary to expectations, self-report and behavioral measures of intellectual humility in parents were not correlated. Moreover, parents who self-reported higher levels of intellectual humility had children who were less humble in their knowledge ratings. That said, consistent with predictions, parents who were less humble in the way they indicated knowledge gaps had children who were less humble in the way they assessed their knowledge. These findings support that there are links between parent and child intellectual humility, but the pattern may depend on how parent intellectual humility is measured. Implications for understanding the development of intellectual humility are discussed.