Intellectual Humility and Medication Adherence: A Path Toward Productive Interactions With Medical Information

According to the Information, Motivation, and Strategy model, adherence could be improved by facilitating more effective interactions with medical information. Given that intellectual humility concerns people’s approach to new knowledge and information, this study aims to demonstrate intellectual humility’s (IH) ability to predict adherence. Participants (N = 385; 47% female; Mage = 40.61; SDage = 11.14) completed an online study with measures for IH, general humility, demographics, health status, and general medication adherence. Bivariate correlations showed that IH was positively correlated with adherence, and hierarchical multiple regression showed that IH predicted overall and individual facets of general medication adherence above and beyond other measured factors. This study offered evidence to show that IH could play an influential role in medical adherence. However, this cross-sectional evidence is modest and IH needs to be further explored in the medical context, particularly given the complexity of adherence as a health behavior.