The Science Behind Our Element of Humility: Sources We Love

If you've been following along with our Humility series on Joy Lab (starts on episode 268), you know we've been digging into some fascinating research. Humility isn't just feel-good advice. It's actually a well-studied psychological construct with real implications for mental health, resilience, and social connection. Here's a look at the sources guiding our work for this Element of Humility, and why we think humility deserves a place at the center of any serious conversation about wellbeing.

What Is Humility, Really?

We kicked off the series in Episode 268 with this definition: humility is an accurate, grounded sense of who you are. It's not inflated or deflated. It's also one of the most misunderstood strengths we have.

The philosopher C.S. Lewis described humility as a kind of self-forgetfulness. Which, as the popular advice stemmed from Lewis' work goes, it's not thinking less of yourself, it's thinking of yourself less often. Learn more about Lewis' work at the C.S. Lewis Foundation. C.S. Lewis offers a useful antidote to the hyper self-focused culture many of us are swimming in.

For the spine of our series, we turned to Dr. Daryl Van Tongeren's book Humble. Van Tongeren offers a practical, three-ingredient framework for building humility: know yourself, check yourself, and go beyond yourself. These three components organize the bulk of our Podcast episodes and Program Experiments for Humility. His earlier peer-reviewed work, "Humility" (Van Tongeren et al., 2019, available here), maps the humility across four domains (relational, intellectual, cultural, and existential) which we also touch on throughout the series.

Why Humility Matters for Mental Health

The mental health case for humility is surprisingly robust. Nielsen & Marrone's comprehensive review, "Humility: Our Current Understanding of the Construct and its Role in Organizations", synthesizes decades of research showing that humility is associated with decreased depressive symptoms, greater subjective wellbeing, and better self-reported health. Notably, humble individuals facing stressful life events reported higher life satisfaction and lower anxiety than those scoring lower on humility. These are the common findings associated with humility that have big implications for resilience.

Weidman et al.'s paper, "The Psychological Structure of Humility", goes deeper into how humility works by exploring the emotional and cognitive architecture that makes it distinct from related traits like modesty or low self-esteem. And Wright et al.'s "The Psychological Significance of Humility" examines why it matters not just for individuals, but for relationships and communities.

Intellectual Humility Gets Its Own Spotlight

One type of humility that deserves special attention (hence why we focus on it quite a bit in our series!) is intellectual humility. Intellectual humility is the willingness to hold your beliefs with openness and lean toward curiosity rather than certainty.

Porter et al.'s "Predictors and Consequences of Intellectual Humility" is a great review of what we know about this specific kind of humility, including its downstream effects on learning, relationships, and wellbeing.

And for a more developmental perspective (and also for the humility article with the best title...), Hagá & Olson's study "'If I Only Had a Little Humility, I Would Be Perfect'" looks at how both children and adults perceive intellectually humble versus arrogant people. This is a super interesting take on how deeply social our relationship with humility really is.

A Poet to Close Us Out

We close Episode 268 with a bit of a poem by Wendell Berry from his collection Standing by Words (the full poem is called "The Real Work"). Berry offers some deep wisdom about our most important work...

"It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go, we have come to our real journey."

We hope these resources open some doors for you. If you're in the Joy Lab Program, your experiments for this Element are designed with all of this research in mind.

More links to listen

Apple Podcasts: Start of the Humility series (#268) 

Spotify: Start of the Humility series (#268)