Humble Beginnings: Current Trends, State Perspectives, and Hallmarks of Humility

After decades of neglect, research in humility is finally turning a corner. Within the past few years, investigators have articulated two promising strategies to overcome methodological concerns—namely, using personality judgments and designing humility “stress tests” to elicit humility-relevant behavior. We also highlight an alternative perspective of humility that has not yet gained much attention: the investigation of humility as a state, which helps to understand what humility actually is, how it functions, and its variability within individuals over time. To improve the observation of humility-relevant behavior, we propose five intrapersonal and interpersonal hallmarks of humility that have strong theoretical support, can distinguish between humility’s conceptual foils of narcissism and low self-esteem, and provide broad theoretical ties between ongoing research endeavors: A secure, accepting identity, freedom from distortion, openness to new information, other-focus, and egalitarian beliefs. Finally, to increase methodological rigor, we recommend using a combination of selfand other-reports and employing multiple raters with demonstrated interrater reliability in validation studies. Humble Beginnings: Current Trends, State Perspectives, and Hallmarks of Humility Humility may be the most overlooked and underappreciated virtue. Alfred Lord Tennyson called it “the highest virtue, the mother of them all,” and the founder of one of the most widely used character transformation programs embedded humility in each of his 12 steps (AA Services, 2002). After decades of stagnation as a topic in psychology, the scientific study of humility is finally turning a corner. Currently, to our knowledge, at least seven research groups now maintain active programs investigating humility, and their efforts are producing fruitful results. For example, researchers are examining humility in specific contexts, such as intellectual domains (Thrive Center for Human Development, 2013), leadership (Owens, Johnson, & Mitchell, in press), and relationships (Davis et al., 2011, 2012). Investigators in the area are also operationalizing humility in divergent ways—as an adaptive form of pride (Cheng, Weidman, & Tracy, 2013), a personality trait (Exline & Hill, 2012; LaBouff et al., 2012; Landrum, 2011), a set of relationship skills (Davis et al., 2011), a leadership style (Owens, Johnson, & Mitchell, in press), and a range of meta-cognitive abilities (Thrive Center for Human Development, 2013). In this paper, we survey recent methodological trends in the measurement of humility, discuss the value of approaching humility as a state, and propose five observable indicators (i.e., “hallmarks”) of humility: a secure, accepting identity, freedom from distortion, openness to new information, other-focus, and egalitarian beliefs. These hallmarks may aid researchers as they operationalize or validate new measures of humility and provide broad theoretical ties between ongoing research endeavors.