 are some people born intellectually humble. From the foregoing discussion, we might conclude we're all doomed to intellectual arrogance. That is the universal experience, after all, given our cognitive biases. And only those who apply the effort can become intellectually humble. Yet we know from personality and social psychology that there are individual differences among people concerning the traits like open-mindedness and agreeableness that lend themselves to more intellectually humble person. Moreover, a person might be intellectually humble about some topics, but quite dogmatic about others. Let's say you're very open-minded to different political arguments, but very close-minded when it comes to religious convictions. Could you be characterized as an intellectually arrogant person? And sometimes we can be quite arrogant about an opinion in one circumstance, but more malleable in another. Let's say you had a strong opinion that spanking children is detrimental to their development and said so in a group of like-minded parents. But you were silent about it when your in-laws told you that to spare the rod is to spoil the child. Would you be characterized as an intellectually diffident person? Intellectual humility has many trait-like qualities, but even traits can vary in their expression across situations. Personality psychologists are interested in individual differences between people regarding the relative expression of traits. In this way, the studies are often comparative, measuring how much a given trait influences an individual's thought and behavior compared to others who share the same trait. For example, when measured on the Big Five personality traits that is extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness, individuals show high or low levels of each trait relative to other people. And each trait is orthogonal. That is, a higher or low score on any one trait does not influence the score on other traits. Intellectual humility may or may not work in the same way. It may also have orthogonal characteristics relative to other character traits, such that, for example, being high in intellectual humility may not impact how high or low a person is on courage or persistence. Since we know a lot about personality from the Big Five model, we can use that model to understand intellectual humility. For example, we can imagine that high levels of openness to experience might correlate with high intellectual humility. Similar corollaries of intellectual humility might exist within some facets of agreeableness or conscientiousness, even neuroticism which measures emotional stability. There's an additional personality construct, a six-factor model, that includes honesty-humility as an additional factor. We might expect humility to correlate strongly with intellectual humility, but not completely, as they represent different constructs. There are other personality traits, such as a need for cognition, which is people's tendency to engage in and enjoy meaningful cognitive activity and the need for cognitive closure, which is characterized by a need to make decisions to have an issue closed, that might inform the study of intellectual humility. Those high in need for cognition, who enjoy engaging in thinking and learning, might be expected to be higher in intellectual humility. Intellectual humility might require a person to remain open to revising opinions and ideas, a task difficult for those high in need for cognitive closure. Now there is some controversy in the field of social and personality psychology about the power of personality traits to influence behavior. People are not consistent in their behavior across situations. Perhaps you know someone who is shy in the situations you encounter them, say a classroom or an office. This person is reticent to speak up, not offering opinions very readily. Then you run into that person in a setting outside the classroom or office, say an athletic competition like a basketball game. Suddenly that same quiet person is yelling at the referee, leading the chairs for the home team. Could this be the same person? The situation seems to be determining the behavior. It's important to study not only how traits make people behave in a certain way, but how people's perceptions of situations and their reactions to them make people behave in a certain way. Many situations might influence the expression of intellectual humility away from the virtuous mean and toward either end of the vicious spectrum, rather toward intellectual diffidence or intellectual arrogance. A number of recent studies with different methodological approaches have investigated the effect of situation on intellectual humility and its vicious counterpart intellectual arrogance. The first approach is to focus on situations that affect either the perception or expression of intellectual arrogance across individuals, investigating what kinds of situations might increase intellectual humility in general. And the second approach is to measure the trait of intellectual humility in individuals, and then test under which circumstances that trait is either more or less present. This approach is more interested in the person by situation and interaction and asks the question under what circumstances and in which situations do individuals show more or less intellectual humility. An example of the first approach was a study done by Gadu and Kyle of how searching the internet influences people to think that information they have access to is now a part of their own knowledge base and makes them more confident about what they know. What it appears makes you think you're smarter than you really are. Researchers who take the second approach and study the interaction of personality and situation have looked at how people react in different situations such as in the realms of politics versus the realm of religion. Even someone high in intellectual humility can react differently depending on the situation showing more arrogance in one situation versus the other. So what are we to conclude? Is intellectual humility a stable, long-lasting trait or blown about by the winds of the situation? The answer is yes. Both situation and trait influence the expression of intellectual humility and the interaction of the two. Therefore, developing measures to assess the relative disposition of intellectual humility in people is a necessary step to furthering important intellectual virtue. And then examining the situations that either promote or inhibit the expression of intellectual humility is also a critical line of investigation. Testing the trait of intellectual humility in various situations will yield critical knowledge of how intellectual humility plays out. A later line of research, the trait by situation interaction, may be the most informative in promoting conditions for more civil discourse especially in the areas of disagreement. Learning how to exchange ideas in an intellectually humble way and the situations that might have promote such exchange would make a positive impact on our society.