Am I arrogant? Listen to me and we will both become more humble

ABSTRACT

We report four studies that examine listening as an antecedent of humility. We tested our hypotheses across four experiments (N = 597) using both self-reports and other reports of humility. Study 1 employed a recall task of poor or good listening. Studies 2 and 3 randomly assigned dyads to poor or good listening conditions. Study 4 randomly assigned dyads to good, distracted, or argumentative conditions and revealed that the learning of the listener is the driving mechanism behind the link between listening and humility of the listener. An internal meta-analysis of the results indicated that listening increases humility across all studies, that these effects were present beyond liking, and were strongest on the listener’s humility more than the speaker’s humility. These results confirm that humility can be experimentally activated, and that listening is one of the situational factors that can cultivate humility and contribute to positive psychological outcomes.

KEYWORDS:

• humility
• listening
• experimental
• complexity
• awe

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data described in this article are openly available in the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/fnby7/

Open Scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badge for Open Materials. The materials are openly accessible at https://osf.io/hcx59/

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. Out of the 32% non-native speakers, all indicated their Hebrew level was average and up. When repeating the tests only on native Hebrew speakers the effects of the experimental condition on both appreciative- and self-abasing-humility were even stronger.

2. Because our hypotheses are based on the idea that humility is a form of self-complexity, we asked participants to remember a conversation on a topic that was important to them. We assumed that thinking of an unimportant conversation would neither affect participants’ self nor their humility.

3. In all studies we repeated the main analyses only for participants who were native Hebrew speakers. This procedure did not affect our conclusions.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by grants from the Recanati Fund at the School of Business Administration and the Israel Science Foundation (Grant No. 928/17) to the second author and a grant from The John Templeton Foundation (#61392) to the last author.