“[O]ur picture of ourselves has become too grand,” Iris Murdoch lamented in 1997. “We have lost the vision of a reality separate from ourselves.” Today, humility is considered a vice in many corners of our proclamatory digital environment. Instead, hubris is the order of the day. Bold pronouncement of opinion, rather than honest inquiry, dominates our digital lives.
There are obvious reasons for this. One is what might be called the monologic architecture of many digital platforms: Design favors expression, proclamation, and promotion rather than true dialog and civil discourse. Another is the status of “engagement” as the universal metric of success online: the system of likes, follows, and audience share rewards emotionally resonant content, and outrage, grievance, and indignation have proven to be among the stickiest affective drivers of all. Yet another reason is the relative anonymity and disembodiment of the digital world: We say and do things online that we would never dare to say or countenance face to face. And we know that real harms are associated with all of this: increased problems with alienation, anxiety, polarization, and bullying.
The opposite of hubris—humility—will play a curative role in any effort to address our largely toxic world of online communication. A reassertion of the virtue of humility, and the cultivation of strategies to encourage a more honest sense of self, will be critical in the construction of a digital ethos. Together with the modeling of humble behavior and the call by psychologists to acknowledge our limitations and weaknesses, we might more fully reclaim the early promise of the internet: to enrich connections and expand knowledge.
Philosophers have shown a resurging interest in the virtue of humility (i.e., Narvaez, 2019; Tanesini, 2021; Wright, 2019). So have psychologists; the development of a robust self-report measure for humility (Alfano et al., 2017) has ushered a heightened interest in personality characteristics and behaviors associated with humility. It turns out that people who exhibit humility also tend to be wise and skillful in a host of ways. People with a high degree of humility also tend to show more general knowledge, have more intrinsic motivation to learn, and are more prone to reflection and intellectual engagement (Krumrei-Mancuso et al., 2020). Humility is correlated with curiosity, tolerance for ambiguity, and low levels of dogmatism (Leary et al., 2017). People with high levels of humility also are more open to opposing views and are more likely to exhibit a growth mindset (Porter & Schumann, 2018). They also engage in more sophisticated information-seeking (Gorichanaz, 2021). High levels of humility also have been shown to predict “mastery” behaviors such as seeking out challenges and overcoming intellectual setbacks (Porter et al., 2020).
Our traditional understanding of humility, going back to Socrates, Augustine, and other classical philosophers, has emphasized modesty, or how good we are at handling our intellectual limitations. Its focus has largely emphasized self-abnegation or one’s “smallness.” Yet this type of humility doesn’t seem suited to the challenges of our digital lives. Instead, philosopher Jennifer Wright offers a more expansive and useful update for understanding how the virtue of humility actually works in our lives. She describes humility as “an epistemically and ethically aligned state of awareness” in which we are able to set aside “the natural centeredness of our phenomenological and psychological constitution” (2019). As such, humility does not feature a “contraction” of the self so much as an expansion as we come to fully apprehend the world’s complexity, including the features of reality that are “external” to our own experiences and perceptions. This phenomenological shift requires a “quieting” of our own selves to see reality more holistically:
Being able to do all the things required for maturely virtuous engagement (i.e., identifying and evaluation the relevant information, deciding what to do, and, then in addition, successfully implementing that decision without undue internal interference) requires that the maturely virtuous person be able to cognitively and affectively experience and appreciate that actual significance—the ‘weight,’ as it were—of the many different features of the situation, many of which are not her own and/or are external to her, that contribute to the determination of the appropriate response in a given instance. This requires, at its foundation, the absence—or at least the temporary ‘quieting’—of interfering and distorting influences (2019; original emphases).
Humility, Wright argues, is not just self-abnegation but should be understood as a special sort of freedom: “She is able to escape the centripetal forces of her own natural centeredness, and the biases that arise from it, and is thus able to genuinely experience the pull of others’ needs, desires, interests, beliefs, goals, and values as strongly as she does her own, becoming a genuine sister to all of humanity” (2019; original emphasis). This reframing of humility as enlightened agency, paradoxical as it may seem, will be an essential ingredient for the antidote to our online toxicity.
So, how might this newfound understanding of humility help us mitigate our digital toxicity? It will likely require social, technical, and individual strategies:
- Better design: Nudges built into social media platforms to encourage more systematic perspective-taking, as well as stage-setting strategies for actual conversations, can encourage more humble behavior. While generative artificial intelligence tools have raised urgent ethical questions, the generation of relevant nudges for social media platforms will likely emerge as a promising application, where prompts can urge deeper thinking and turning down the temperature. Also, people tend to avoid overestimating their knowledge on a topic when asked to write a detailed description of how something works (Fernbach et al., 2013). More humble exchanges also can be encouraged by asking participants to step back from their interpersonal conflicts and take a “fly on the wall” perspective (Grossmann et al., 2019; Grossmann & Kross, 2014).
- Wiser expression: Only a few studies have explored how intellectual humility might be increased over time. When people were asked to journal daily about significant events from a distanced, third-person perspective, they showed higher intellectual humility after a month (Grossman et al., 2021). We all can benefit from pausing before posting. With reframing, we might find more opportunities to “call in” rather than “call out,” to ask for others’ perspectives rather than proclaim our own. We might all reconsider posting that humblebrag: What are our motives for sharing moments of success and triumph? And why do we typically edit out posts that are unlikely to generate likes? We also might consider how the habit of presenting an idealized self on social media creates a reflexive avoidance of embracing our full humanness. The cultivation of conversational strategies such as those offered by Robb Willer’s Polarization and Social Change Lab, and Jason Baehr’s Cultivating Good Minds (2015b) promote humility and other virtues in public discourse.
- Smarter consumption: If humility in the digital world means anything, it means being willing to explore the unfamiliar. At every turn, however, social media platforms can discourage this. Countering the multiple social media rewards for disregulative scrolling requires a purposefulness that can be difficult to sustain. But help is available, and building smarter consumption habits takes time. We can start by paying more attention to our screen time and working to be more deliberative with it. Apps that provide timers and locks are helpful. There are also web browser plugins that offer ways to intervene with algorithmic feeds and exposure to alternative or oppositional content.