Intellectual Humility and Investigative Behaviors in Relation to Overclaiming of Knowledge

Fake news and other forms of misinformation are becoming increasingly prominent in today’s world (Bowes & Tasimi, 2022). Research has shown that people vary in their susceptibility to believing false information (Zmigrod et al., 2019), but few studies have explored the factors that may aid people in avoiding misinformation. This study examined the relationships among intellectual humility (IH), investigative behaviors, and the tendency to overclaim knowledge of false information. Through an online survey, participants (N = 122) completed the General Intellectual Humility Scale (Leary et al., 2017), an adapted measure of investigative tendencies, and the Overclaiming Questionnaire-150 (Paulhus et al., 2003), a questionnaire that asks participants to indicate their familiarity with existent (e.g., prejudice) and nonexistent topics (e.g., consumer apparatus). Correlational analyses showed that IH was not significantly related to claiming familiarity with either real or fake topics, r(117) = .12, p = .20. However, participants who demonstrated greater IH were more willing than those with lower IH scores to investigate all topics, r(119) = .20, p = .03. Additionally, a negative correlation was found between overclaiming bias and investigative tendencies, suggesting that individuals who wanted to learn more about topics were less likely to overclaim their knowledge, r(103) = –.40, p < .001. Lastly, no significant relationship was found between IH and overclaiming of knowledge, r(103) = –.13, p = .18. People who are aware of the connections among these variables may be more likely to fact-check topics they encounter and avoid overclaiming knowledge. These findings have implications for decreasing susceptibility to false information including fake news.