Isn’t there a chance it’s the other way round. People might start off arrogant but once they acquire enough superior general knowledge they figure they know jack and forces them to be humble ? It’s a common enough fallacy to get cause and effect backwards.
> People might start off arrogant but once they acquire enough superior general knowledge they figure they know jack and forces them to be humble ?
There are too many other variables at play - i.e. inherent psychological disposition, environmental and social factors, institutional incentives - to know how cause and effect work in the development of intellectual humility.
But sometimes arrogance in general (and perhaps intellectual arrogance too) is itself just a thin defense against a dominating unexamined insecurity about oneself.
If acquiring more general knowledge helps make you more comfortable with yourself, it might make you more intellectually humble, but it could also do nothing, or even the opposite.
There is also a chance these concept correlate because they share many of the same characteristics, i.e. they are mostly the same thing.
Measuring psychological concept is far easier then then rigid and if you align one question or answer to one concept there is a good chance you are actually measuring the other, or both. In fact the very concept of general intelligence has been severely criticized for this. To an extend that many psychologist (and laymen like my self) don’t even belief it exists.
Is the article implying causation or just correlation? Because either cause->effect pathway would imply correlation. The pathway you describe seems like a common way to get to humility, through actually learning how little domain knowledge you have.
