Abstract

For the last few years I have been conducting research in the psychology of humility. It's quite a new field, only bursting to life in the last decade or so. Prior to this, most psychologists thought it was almost impossible to study humility in the real world—partly because measuring it is so tricky. If someone gives themselves a ten out of ten for humility on a rating scale, we are more than justified in viewing their self-assessment with suspicion. For quite some time, therefore, humility tended to be studied as a void, an emptiness. It was the absence of narcissism, arrogance, boastfulness, or self-enhancement. Humble people, it was thought, lacked something.