Why humility matters: healthy moral functioning
Should we consider humility important for our moral functioning? There is a solid body of evidence that suggests we should. Indeed, years of research provide strong support for the view that humility is positively connected to healthy moral functioning.
For example, humility (measured by the HEXACO,Ashton and Lee, 2008) has been found to strongly correlate with lower rates of infidelity and other moral transgressions (Hilbig, Moshagen, and Zettler, 2015). People high in humility are more cooperative and more fair in their economic allocations (Ashton and Lee, 2008; Zettler, Hilbig, and Heydasch, 2013) and are more likely to refrain from exploiting others in economic exchanges for their own benefit, even when they have the chance to do so (Hilbig and Zettler, 2009). Humility was also found to negatively correlate with the intention to commit premeditated vengeful acts, to engage in retaliation or displaced aggression (Lee and Ashton, 2012), as well as right-wing authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, and hierarchy-oriented values (Lee,Ashton, Ogunfowora, Bourdage, and Shin, 2010; for an overview, see Ashton et al., 2004).Davis et al. (2011) found humility to be positively related to forgiveness and empathy. And higher levels of perceived humility were related to greater attributions of both warmth-based and conscientiousness-based virtues. Kruse, Chancellor, Ruberton, and Lyubomirsky (2014) found that humility and gratitude to be mutually reinforcing. People who wrote a letter expressing their gratitude showed higher humility than those who performed a neutral activity and people's baseline humility predicted the degree of gratitude felt after writing the letter.
In my own research, my colleagues and I have found humility to be positively related to a wide range of morally important capacities—e.g., empathy, benevolence, civic responsibility, gratitude, humanitarian-egalitarian attitudes, positive moral identity, integrity, universalistic values, mindfulness, conscientiousness, and the tendency to feel guilt for bad behavior and seek to repair wrong-doing.We also found it to be positively related to intrinsic religiosity and faith maturity, as well as negatively related to sadism, psychopathic tendencies, and economic and social greed (Wright, et al., 2018).
Relatedly, we found humility to correlate with several important markers of psychological wellbeing, such as optimism, hope, achievement values, positive life-regard, secure attachment, positive growth, personal relationships, decisiveness, comfort with ambiguity, and openness to experience (Wright, Nadelhoffer, and Ross, 2019).We also found that people's humility was reflected in the way they expressed themselves. Specifically, we asked people to reflect on their relationship with (or to) the surrounding universe or cosmos, God or a higher power, the earth and the environment, and their fellow human beings, and found that when describing these relationships people higher in humility used more inclusive language (e.g., “we”, “us”, “our”, as well as “all”, “together”, “everything”), whereas
those lower in humility used more exclusive language (e.g., “they”, “them”, “people”, “my own”, “some”, etc.). Those higher in humility also used “and” much more frequently, compared to those low in humility, who more frequently used “or”. In summary, we found that people high in humility more frequently used language intended to break down boundaries and hierarchies, to maintain equality, and to emphasize connection, whereas those low in humility more frequently used language designed to express skepticism, impose judgment, assert superiority, and emphasize distance and disconnection (Perini, Langville,Wright and Nadelhoffer, 2019).
And finally, we found that humility predicted people's behavioral responses to conversational partners who disagreed with them. Specifically, we found that people high in humility exhibited little behavioral change (measured in terms of the distance they placed between themselves and those partners) when having a conversation with someone who strongly agreed with them and someone who strongly disagreed with them. People low in humility, on the other hand, acted differently toward—that is, they sat significantly further away from—those who disagreed with them, compared to where they sat when having a conversation with someone who agreed with them.
In sum, our own and others' research clearly shows a close connection between humility and numerous positive moral and social capacities, character strengths, and behaviors, suggesting that humility is a powerful virtue with psychological, moral, and social benefits.
But, elsewhere I have argued (Wright, 2019) that the importance of humility goes deeper than this—that, beyond normal, everyday moral capacities, humility is foundational to mature virtue and moral functioning—e.g., moral exemplarity.
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