Abstract

Humility is a dimension of personality correlated with a range of social behaviors. We begin with a review of the HEXACO model of personality and honesty-humility associations with psychopathy, risk-taking, and antisocial processes in the workplace. We then focus on positive associations between humility and prosocial process like cooperation and forgiveness. Finally, we synthesize research using other measures of humility, discuss a few measurement issues, and consider future directions of social-personality research about humility. Honesty-humility (HH) emerges as a sixth dimension of personality in many languages around the world (Ashton, Lee, & Goldberg, 2004; Ashton et al., 2004; Brocklebank, Pauls, Rockmore, & Bates, 2015; Lee & Ashton, 2004) and uniquely predicts a range of psychological traits and behaviors. Among researchers who study humility, however, there are legitimate questions about the construct validity of the HEXACO “honesty-humility” dimension (Davis et al., 2010), in part because honesty and humility are measured together and because humility and modesty are assumed to be synonymous. One can make a reasonable argument that humility is distinct from honesty and modesty, but that is not our task here. Rather, our primary aim is to provide some background on the HH facet and synthesis about what HH and other measures of humility predict (or do not predict). As reviewed later, we find measures of HH and humility predict a range of fascinating positive psychological qualities.