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I can only speak for philosophy departments, since that is what I've experienced.  I'm fairly certain that most graduate students in philosophy have an experience some time in their first or second year of graduate school where they recognize that they don't know nearly as much as they thought, and that they aren't nearly as smart as they thought.  This is a natural response to being surrounded by a ton of really smart faculty members (and advanced graduate students) who have paid their dues and know their discipline in ways that you weren't even aware were possible.  From people I've talked to in other disciplines, they have a similar experience, but to a lesser degree than philosophers.  This is in large part because the antagonistic nature of philosophy is such that we are constantly told how and why we are wrong to believe what we do.  
That said, there is a fairly large degree of inter-disciplinary rivalry.  This is so for two reasons. First, departments are actually in competition with one-another for funds.  If the economists hire someone else, this comes at the cost of some other department being able to hire someone.  Second, and more important,  Ph.D level academics get really good at approaching social/political/economic/whatever issues from within a very well defined single methodology, and of course they all think that the way they do things is the way things ought to be done.  Part of this is just natural self justification.  If you focus almost single-mindedly on one thing, you HAVE to convince yourself that this thing is VERY valuable and VERY interesting.  This is true whether you are focused on an academic discipline, or on raising your kids (just think about how much parents talk about their own kids to the annoyance of everyone else).  The result of this is that economists come to believe that everyone should look at things as economists do, and philosophers think that everyone should look at things as philosophers do et cetera.  (the case of philosophy is especially interesting because in many ways we don't really have a subject matter, but rather a methodology that we apply to other people's subject matters.  This naturally annoys those other people.  Of course we're right and they are wrong ;)
So I'd say that insofar as you are detecting something, you may be misplacing it.  The attitude in question is not as likely to be "look how smart I am", but rather "look how smart we are".  I think this kind of attitude is found almost everywhere where people surround themselves largely with those who think like they do.  This is true if it is philosophers, economists, Christians, wealthy country-club wasps, leftists, rightists, whatever.  
 
That said, I still think that the SABR writing style is just recognizably academic.  I happen to really like it, but of course, I've been trained to appreciate it.  
 
As an aside, I should say that I think academic disciplinarity is a good thing.  There are truths you discover by getting really focussed in a single methodology.  The mistake is to think that this is all that may be worth discovering.  Inter-disciplinarity is a good goal for academic institutions, but this should be understood as "multi-disciplinarity" not, some ill defined kind of non-disciplinarity.