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Abstract
Connections between humility and other prosocial qualities led us to develop a humility–helpfulness hypothesis. In three studies, humble persons were more helpful than less humble persons. In Study 1, participants (n = 117) completed self-report measures of humility, the Big Five, and helpfulness. In Study 2, participants (n = 90) completed an implicit measure of humility and were presented with an unexpected opportunity to help someone in need. In Study 3, participants (n = 103) completed self-report and implicit measures of humility and were presented a similar helping opportunity. Humility and helpfulness correlated positively when personality and impression management were controlled. Humble participants helped more than did less humble participants even when agreeableness and desirable responding were statistically controlled. Further, implicit humility uniquely predicted helping behavior in an altruistic motivation condition.
Acknowledgements
This work is supported by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation.
Notes
Notes
1. Readers with additional interest in definitions and measurement of this complex construct may see Davis et al. (Citation2010, Citation2011) for reviews.
2. The honesty–humility subscale was designed by Ashton and Lee (Citation2005) to measure four facets: sincerity, fairness, greed-avoidance, and modesty. To assess humility independently from honesty, we used the greed-avoidance and modesty facets of Honesty–Humility but not the sincerity or fairness subscales.
3. IATs have been utilized extensively to measure various aspects of personality and self-concept (cf. Schnabel, Asendorpf, & Greenwald, Citation1990), for a review of the validity of the IAT, see Greenwald, Poehlman, Uhlmann, and Banaji (Citation2009).
4. During the post-experiment interview/debriefing session of Study 3, 11 of 114 participants (9.6%) expressed high suspicion about the cover story. Five suspicious participants were in the high-pressure condition and six in the low-pressure condition. Data from these 11 participants were omitted prior to Study 3 analyses. Study 3 results were based on the final sample of 103 participants (52 in the high-pressure condition and 51 in the low-pressure condition).
5. In general, correspondence between implicit and explicit measures of constructs is somewhat variable (Hofmann, Gawronski, Gschwender, Le, & Schmitt, Citation2005; Nosek, Citation2005). In this study, the implicit measure was loosely associated with individual explicit measures of humility but positively correlated with an aggregate explicit measure (), consistent with Rowatt et al. (Citation2006) and a meta-analysis which revealed a 0.17 weighted mean effect size between implicit and personality measures (Greenwald et al., Citation2009). Given that both implicit and explicit measures appear to explain unique variability in humility-related behaviors and the suggestion by several researchers in the field to investigate multimodal and supplemental measurement approaches to self-report (e.g., Davis et al., Citation2010, 2011; Tangney, Citation2002), the inclusion of multiple measures allowed the investigation of the relative contributions of different measurement strategies while providing a broader overall measure of the construct in the aggregate humility measure.
6. We note that our primary purpose was to investigate the humility–helpfulness hypothesis, not mediators of this relationship. Given that we did not know at the outset whether a humility main-effect on helping would be found, we did not speculate a priori about statistical mediators of the effect. Like Krueger et al. (Citation2001), we examined whether a component of personality accounted for unique variability in helping. After finding the humility–helpfulness connection, we simply tested whether humility remained a significant predictor when certain other qualities were controlled. Now that the humility–helpfulness link has been established, others may decide to examine whether other qualities mediate the relationship.