Women’s humility and men’s lack of hubris: Gender biases in self-estimated spatial intelligence

Women tend to see themselves as less capable than men. Some have interpreted this as female underestimation and male overestimation—the so-called hubris-humility effect. While such an effect could have important practical implications (e.g., on career choices), only few studies directly compared men's and women's self-estimated and measured abilities. We aimed to investigate the hubris-humility effect in spatial intelligence, a domain in which women’s and men’s abilities are documented to differ considerably. To contextualize the hubris-humility effect, we tested how conceptually related personality traits (narcissism and honesty-humility) were associated with the misestimation of spatial intelligence. We further analyzed relations with STEM-related professional interests. 208 participants (103 women; aged 18-37) completed self-estimate and performance measures of spatial intelligence as well as personality and interest questionnaires in a laboratory. Women gave lower self-estimates despite performing similarly well to men in spatial tasks. This constituted female humility but not male hubris: Women underestimated themselves but men did not overestimate themselves. Gender predicted misestimation over and above personality traits. Women further reported lower STEM-related interests than men. These interests, in turn, showed stronger associations to self-estimated than measured spatial intelligence. However, gender predicted STEM-related interests over and above self-estimated and measured spatial intelligence. The lack of gender differences in measured spatial intelligence was surprising but can likely be explained by our tasks. Notably, women’s self-estimates regarding the same tasks were still lower than men’s. Our findings suggests that interventions improving women’s self-views in the spatial domain might contribute towards greater gender equality in STEM.