Back to the Relational Roots of Humility: A Critical Narrative Review of Dyadic Studies

Abstract

After a slow start, research on humility has proliferated. On one hand, humility has been linked with benefits for physical health, mental health, and relationships across a range of settings (e.g., business, schools, psychotherapy, families). More recently, scholars have also warned about possible drawbacks of humility, particularly within relationships involving potential for abuse of power (e.g., gender norms applied differently for men than women). Thus, the purpose of the present review was to revisit the conceptual roots of work on humility as a relational virtue. Methodologically, much of the work on humility and relationships has ignored concerns about measurement and the need to study the construct with dyadic data and multiple methods. Accordingly, in this critical narrative review, our manuscript synthesizes research on humility employing dyadic data to consider humility as a social action. We found 15 articles (22 studies or independent samples) that examined humility using dyadic research designs. Although humility was correlated with relational benefits, these findings were often qualified by contextual factors, such as the personality of one’s relational partner or partners. Implications for future research on humility and its relational benefits are discussed.