The Cure for Self-Importance
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This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Whenever a group of people come together, there are always a few who steal the limelight. They may be gregarious and outgoing, or funnier, or more athletic. But I've noticed over the years that the people who are the center of attention on day one are very often not the center of their groups by day 62 or day 912. This is true of college students, new employees at a company, even family.

Over time, the accomplished musician turns out to be a one-note opera. The athlete who dazzled on day one starts to sound boring. The great storyteller turns out he has only a dozen stories, and he keeps telling them over and over again. In time, groups often gravitate to the people who are connectors, the folks who are genuinely interested in others. They are often great listeners. These are people who put others first, who don't imagine they know everything.

This week on Hidden Brain, and in a companion story on our subscription feed, Hidden Brain Plus, we examine the science and psychology of humility. It's a quality that is often underappreciated on day one, but much in demand over the long haul. And while most of us don't associate humble people with being particularly brave, new scientific research shows that humility usually walks hand in hand with courage.

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Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. National average 12-month savings of $744 by new customers surveyed who saved with Progressive between June 2022 and May 2023. Potential savings will vary. Discounts not available in all states and situations. Many people have the experience of growing up in one set of circumstances and then finding themselves in a different set of circumstances as they grow up and start life on their own.

If that's a familiar story to you, you also know what it's like to go back to the old family home, the old neighborhood. They haven't changed much, but you, you find yourself miles apart, maybe galaxies apart, from the folks you knew as a kid. How do you respond to this? Do you go back to being the old you who fits in or the new you who doesn't? Daryl Van Tongeren is a psychologist at Hope College in Michigan.

He experienced the schism after he left his family home in Southern California and went off to college and graduate school. Daryl Van Tongeren, welcome to Hidden Brain. Thanks so much for having me. Tell me a little bit about your family of origin, Daryl. I understand you grew up in a conservative Christian household?

I did, yeah. So growing up, I grew up in a working class family. My mom immigrated from the Netherlands when she was 10 or 11, married my dad who was a heavy diesel mechanic for Los Angeles County. And really the focus on my family was a lot about being together. We were a deeply religious family, very conservative, and really highly prioritized practical things. My dad was avid about cars and loved working on his cars.

Did he spend a lot of time tinkering in his spare time? It sounds like he was working with his hands during his day job, but also with his hands in his spare time. Absolutely. So he had this prized possession, this 1972 Chevelle Supersport. Any time he could, holidays, weekends, he was always tinkering on that car, trying to get it just right. Did he try and get his kids engaged in his passion? He did, sadly for him, with not much success. So we didn't share his same passion for that car. ♪

Daryl and his siblings had other interests. They were all bookish in their own ways. They all went on to college, the first in their immediate family to do so. Daryl continued on to graduate school. And as he became highly educated, he felt more and more removed from his working class roots.

It was challenging in many regards. When I went to graduate school, I felt out of place because I was in situations and with people who were much more educated than my family was. We would be at cocktail parties talking about things we had read and presumably sharing experiences we thought we all had as children that I didn't have. And then going back home, I felt like I couldn't fit in either because

Here I was trying to be this budding intellectual, cultivate a life of the mind, and it was much more pragmatic, and let's talk about the car, or let's talk about sports. And so I always felt kind of caught in between. Darrell tried to interest his dad in the things he was reading and learning. And I asked him, hey, what if we read something? You read something, I'll read it, we'll kind of connect on that. And he kind of said, without missing a beat, you know, Darrell, I literally have no interest in reading whatsoever. ♪

And I think at that moment, I felt this condescension. I felt this, you know, holier-than-thou attitude, like, how could you not have any interest in reading? And I probably rolled my eyes to hold back some of my contempt. And that's when I really felt that difference. In time, Daryl came to see that he was part of the problem. When he looked down on his dad for not being interested in books, his own disdain placed a barrier between them.

I think one of the things that I was doing that was impeding my relationship was I was really failing to take his perspective. So I was really centering what's going on in my life. I'm the one feeling hurt. Why doesn't he understand me and not imagining? I wonder what it's like for my dad to have someone move far away. The rest of his kids were right there living in the same town. Here I am. I've left. I'm on the East Coast.

Um, you know, maybe he's feeling a little intimidated because he never graduated from college. And here I am with a, with an advanced degree, you know, are, are there ways that I'm, that I'm speaking down to hear him? I'm acting in a condescending way and really failing to appreciate and take his perspective. And once I realized that I had a part to play, I had to own up and take responsibility for what I was contributing to, to, uh,

that relationship, it was only then that we could start making a turn into something better. Daryl went on to become a psychologist. He started to study humility. But as the years passed, he noticed that it was one thing to learn about humility and another to practice it. One time, he was being interviewed by a reporter who asked him an interesting question that involved Daryl's wife, Sarah.

Yeah, so this reporter was covering some of my recent research on humility within romantic relationships. And she said, you know, I'm kind of curious, you know, because you're someone who studies humility, right?

You know, how do you fare in your romantic relationship? You know, would your partner consider you, how humble would your partner consider you to be? So she said, you know, would you mind asking your wife how humble you are? So, oh, so happy. You know, I'm so excited to go collect the data and prove to the reporter and the rest of the world that obviously someone who studies humility must be extremely humble. Uh-huh.

So I come upstairs from this interview from the basement and I say, Sarah, on a scale of one to 10, how humble would you rate me? And she says, one to 10, I think I'd rate you a four. And so I'm crestfallen because I think, oh gosh, a four, that's below the midpoint. And then she says, well, wait a minute, is one high or low? So for a moment, I think, well, maybe she misunderstood and I'll still be above the midpoint. I say, no, one is low and 10 is high. And she goes, yeah, four. Yeah, you're just a four. Yeah.

I'm wondering if you asked her how she reached this conclusion, Daryl. Obviously, this was very different from your own conclusion of yourself. I immediately got defensive about why she would rate me as a four. And she kind of quickly pointed out that

This was a day where we had promised to go to the beach. I promised that we would leave for the beach no later than 11, but even knowing that, I took an interview at 10 a.m., and I assured her it'll be 15 minutes tops. Well, this interview drug on 75, almost 90 minutes. Wow. So we're running late. My wife has already packed the lunches. She's packed the towels, packed the reading material. She's ready to go to the beach. I finally come up. We're already running late, wasting precious sunshine, parking spots, and I'm like,

And then before I even ask her to rate me, I say, you know, would you mind driving the stuff out there to the beach? I'd like to run to the beach because I'm training for a marathon. I need to get a run in today. And the beach is about seven miles away, you know, and I was thinking about a seven mile run is what I was going to put in anyway. So would you mind, you know, after all that you've done, going the extra mile and taking it all out to the beach and I'll just meet you down there after I get my run in.

So, looking back, four was probably a pretty gracious and compassionate response. It was probably higher than I deserved at the moment.

And of course, at that point, you didn't quite see it, right? You hadn't quite sort of seen the context when you came up the stairs and asked her because you obviously expected her to give you an eight or a nine. That's exactly right. It was still lost on me. Even as she's painting me this picture, I still am trying to marshal my defense for, well, on average, you know, on average, aren't I kind of a humble guy? Don't I usually take your feedback? Don't I usually listen to you? And

And her blood is boiling because she said, you're literally not listening to me right now. I'm giving you feedback and you're not being responsive. You're responding defensively. If anything, you're confirming that you're a four. It took Daryl some time to see things from his wife's point of view. In time, his experience dovetailed with one of his research findings. When you are acting arrogantly, it can be hard to realize you're acting arrogantly.

When we come back, the psychological drivers and benefits of humility. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

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Protect your home this summer with 20% off any new SimpliSafe system when you sign up for fast protect monitoring. Just visit simplisafe.com slash brain. That's simplisafe.com slash brain. There's no safe like SimpliSafe. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Daryl Van Tongeren studies the science of humility.

Over many years, he has studied different kinds of humility and also the effects that humility can have in the workplace, in society, and in personal relationships.

We sampled people who were in these ongoing romantic relationships, and we asked them to rate how humble their partner was. And we also asked them things about their relationship, such as how committed are you to your relationship? How satisfied? How much do you forgive your partner? And what we found was that people who had humble partners, they were actually more committed to these partners. And because of that commitment, they reported being more satisfied in their relationship, and they were more likely to forgive their partner when their partner did something wrong. Hmm.

So really, humility is the signal for how you're likely to be treated in a relationship with someone else. And what that elicits from us is the strong sense of commitment that really enriches our relationships. And you found that this might be the case not just with established romantic couples, but even people considering getting into a relationship. You ran a study once using dating profiles. Tell me about that work.

So with this study, we brought participants in the lab and we showed them different mock dating profiles. And one was written rather arrogantly and one was written humbly. We had another version where they got feedback about the participant's personality, including their humility or their arrogance.

And in both situations, people really rated more favorably the profile that was humbler. So they wanted to be with the person who had the humble dating profile. They were more willing to want to meet that person, share their own profile, or even share their phone number to connect with this person outside of the study. There's a great irony here, Daryl, because of course, when you think about the way people fill out their dating profiles, this is not the advice they follow.

No, right. Most people want to put forth their most narcissistic self, right? That's the shirtless photo, right? Them on a boat or with a lot of money. But if you're thinking about a long-term committed relationship, the ones that are the best are not the ones with the narcissists who are the life of the party because they're putting other people down because that sours really quickly. Eventually, you're the person they target and put down. Long-term,

committed relationships, those are going to thrive on a bedrock of humility. You've also looked at relationships when either both partners are humble or only one partner is humble. What do you find? Yeah, so both with first-time parents and with people who are in these ongoing relationships, what we found is that when both partners are humble,

it really helps them in these critical periods of stress. So we had one study where we recruited participants during their last trimester before birth, and then we tested them again after the child was born. A very stressful time. And if both partners are humble, they reported less depression, less stress, but only when both partners were humble. In another study, we brought participants in the lab and we had them argue about an area of contentious disagreement, kind of an ongoing argument in their relationship.

for nine minutes. And while they did, we had them hooked up to blood pressure cuffs. And what we found was if both partners were humble, they actually had a better physiological response, lower kind of blood pressure reactions to being in this stressful disagreement. But again, it's only present in those couples when both partners are humble, because if one is humble and one is arrogant, you run the risk of being exploited. And so what happens in those situations when you have a mismatch?

In the mismatch, there can actually be a downside to being humble, right? Because you're the one who's picking up the slack. You're caring for the child more or you're the one conceding to the argument. And those people's outcomes are poorer. Now, the same thing obviously happens in work settings. You know, all over the world, people prefer to work with partners who are humble and no one likes to work with someone who is a know-it-all. Can you tell me a little bit about this work? What does the research show about the role of humility in the workplace?

Yeah, there's a big literature of research on humility in leadership and in the workplace. And what they find is that people are much more willing to work for humble leaders. There's higher productivity, more employee engagement, employee satisfaction. Teams are more creative. We also see that humility operates a little bit like a social contagion. So if the leader is humble, it spreads to the workers, spreads to the teams, and it has this cascading effect where everyone in the organization expresses more humility.

So we've talked a bit about this idea that's broadly under the umbrella of relational humility. And I want to pivot now to a different kind of humility. I understand that some years ago, you and your wife moved to a new town and started spending time with another couple. And it gave you a window into the nature of another kind of humility that we've talked about on the show before. This would be intellectual humility. Tell me the story of your interaction with these new friends.

So we moved to this town because I've got the job at Hope College and we're meeting this couple, really smart couple, very well-traveled, very cultured, close friends of ours, really. And as we're getting to know them more, right here I am coming from a working class background, feeling very much out of my element. They start mentioning books that they've read or shows that they've watched or maybe museums that they've interacted with and explored before.

And they ask, hey, Daryl, have you read this book? Have you seen this show? And out of kind of insecurity and shame, like, oh, yeah, I've seen that. I've read that. I've watched that. And really, I never had. I was lying about these things. And then they would talk to me, and I'd spend the next 15 minutes feeling very uncomfortable having to fake my way through a conversation. Yeah. Yeah.

And one night I got home and I thought, you know, I'm just tired of that. I'm just going to stop doing that. And so what I started doing was the next time that happened and they said, hey, have you seen the show or read this book? I just flatly said, no, I haven't. And you would be surprised. I said, oh, you haven't read that book? They walked to the other room. They grabbed the book. They loaned it to me. They said, you'd love it.

And I'm like, oh my gosh, they didn't judge me. I just, now I get to read the book or they said, oh, you haven't watched the show. I'll send it to you via text. You all can watch it and we can discuss. And so once I realized I should stop faking what I didn't know and just be honest about what I didn't, it just opened up my world and now I could enjoy these things so much more.

Can you talk about the role of intellectual humility or the lack of intellectual humility in our public and social and even our media climate? Because I feel like when I see people on cable television, when I see roundtables at conferences where people are on panels, there are very few people who actually say, I don't know the answer to this question. That's a really good question. It's beyond me.

Yeah.

And so between our unwillingness or inability to engage with people who differ from us and a very tailored algorithm for how we get our news, if we're using our phone or our computer, we're just reinforced with the way I see the world has to be the way that everyone else sees the world. And if they don't, surely their way is far inferior to the way I see it.

It's not just that people want to speak with certainty, but we are also drawn to people who speak with certainty. That when someone says they're hesitant, they say, I don't know, this is beyond my pay grade, you know, I'll have to get back to you on the answer. That person looks less qualified, less smart than the person who says, I know the answer and here it is.

That's exactly right. And if you think about it, the core of the scientific enterprise, the root of it should be a curiosity of saying, I don't know, but I'd like to go find out, and I'm going to gather the sufficient empirical evidence to do so. But even within the academy, we've become increasingly more rewarded for coming up with our pet theory, defending our pet theory to other reviewers or academics who might suggest we're wrong, and then trying to get tenure by proving to everybody that we're right.

and then viciously defending it when people come up with new data that suggests we might be wrong. And so there's something about our fear of uncertainty, our fear of a loss of control, or our inability to live where we don't have all the answers that does make us naturally drawn to people who project that type of confidence and charisma that they have all the answers. Yeah.

So one other way in which we do not respond with appropriate humility is something known as the humble brag. It's become something of a meme, I think, on social media. But can you talk about this idea, Daryl, that we pretend to be humble with these very clever humble brags?

Yeah, so the humble brag is a way of expressing publicly that we feel very grateful for something while you're on your brand new yacht or showing off your new car or winning this prestigious promotion or talking about your salary. And, you know, I'm just deeply grateful I didn't earn this. And so it can kind of take two flavors. So one flavor is showcasing your great achievement in a way that you're really not demonstrating any gratitude towards other people directly.

or acknowledgement for other people's credit that might have led you to get there. And the other is...

to solicit from other people, you know, even more affirmation about how great your situation might be by, you know, pretending to falsely be modest. Like, oh, this old thing. Oh, you know, that's, it's totally fine. Yeah. I'm so disappointed with myself that it took me three hours to finish this marathon. Yeah. Yeah. That's exactly right. Right. And everyone who, you know, finished the marathon in four or running marathons are like, oh man, what does that mean for me? Yeah.

One reason humility can be hard to practice is that most of us have blind spots when it comes to our view of ourselves. With his students, Daryl conducts an exercise that reveals this blind spot. Yeah, so I hand out index cards to my students and I have them rate themselves compared to the average student at our college on zero to 100 percent. You know, how intelligent are you? How attractive are you? How sociable are you?

And almost without fail, everybody rates themselves on average between the 65th and 70th percentile. So yeah, exactly. You get it. So everyone kind of sees themselves as above average. And so once that kind of sinks in, they laugh. But then I follow up and I say, but most of you actually think that's true, right? Most of you actually think that you're above average, even though half of us have to be below average.

And so it demonstrates two things. One is what's called the above average effect, right? So, or the better than average effect. Most of us think that we're above average. And the second thing it demonstrates is even when we're given feedback that we're biased, we have this bias blind spot. And even when we're given feedback, we may acknowledge that we're biased, but we're not as biased as other people. So we're even biased about our own bias. There's another type of humility that you have studied and you call it cultural humility. How would you define this term, Daryl?

So cultural humility is our ability to not view our own cultural way of life as superior, to engage other people across cultural differences with curiosity, with respect, and with a sense of equality, and then a willingness to want to learn from other cultural differences and to view cultural diversity as a strength rather than a threat to our way of being.

I understand that you were challenged some years ago to see things from a different perspective when a student at your college came to you in some distress. What did she tell you, Daryl?

She came to my office and she was a young African-American woman who said, you know, the college is considering arming its security officers. And, you know, I'm quite concerned about this. A number of my friends are very concerned that we're going to be disproportionately negatively affected by this. You know, we learned in social psychology about the way that prejudice and stereotyping plays out in these types of situations. And I'm very concerned.

And she said, you know, I'm scared to even share this with you. You're a white male professor. I'm intimidated by you. I'm nervous to even express these concerns to you. But I figured because we talked about it in class, maybe you would be a good place to start. I was so touched by this. We both broke down into tears. We had a moment of sharing. And really what came out of that was

I took seriously the things that she said. I followed up with some administrators. And I'm not saying that I or she alone was the reason they did not make this decision. But I was very pleased to be able to report back to her a few months later that they, in fact, had decided not to move forward. And I was very grateful for her honesty and sharing her experience.

Now, to be clear, this was not a concern that you had initially had yourself. So until she brought this to you, it wasn't like you were staying up at night worried that the security officers were being armed at your school.

Right. That's right. For me, it was more of this abstract, like, well, I don't really think this is a good idea. The research suggests this isn't very good, but who am I to say anything? I'm just going to go on with my day. That's absolutely right. She elevated it to a concern by sharing her own anxiety, her own fear around this issue.

But of course, what you did is you didn't just simply filter her concerns through the lens of whether you shared her concerns. You actually put yourself in her shoes. And I think very often what happens in a lot of these situations is that when we hear about someone's concerns, we ask ourselves...

Are those concerns the same as my concerns? So if we share those concerns, we say, well, of course, the concerns are legitimate and we should do something with it. But if we don't share those concerns, we often tend to say, well, they must not be real or they can't be real or they're just made up. And I think what you're saying here, Daryl, is that sometimes even if something doesn't make sense to us, cultural humility asks us to accept that they can be a real concern to someone else.

That's exactly right. And in that moment, it was so deeply moving to see how vulnerable she was and how affected she was by this, that I couldn't help but be compelled to see that this was much more of a concern than I had originally thought it to be, and for many more people than just myself.

You know, I'm thinking about the idea of naive realism, which is a powerful idea in psychology, which is that we all believe that the way we see the world is the way the world actually is. And it takes something of an act of effort to say, yes, I have my set of views of the world and I have my concerns. But if you have a different view or a different set of concerns, that doesn't make your views or your concerns insignificant or mistaken.

Right. And that way of thinking is so baked into our psychological architecture because, you know, you start asking yourself, well, if I'm wrong about this, and even if it's something small, what else might I be wrong about? And if you extrapolate that up higher and higher and higher, you start thinking about, well, am I wrong about this?

these big, deep existential questions about how I'm spending my life's purpose or what happens to me after I die or what the meaning of life might be. And all of those are very deeply unsettling to consider that we might be wrong, although all the evidence suggests that most of us probably are wrong. When we come back, practicing humility and the challenge of accepting what we don't know when it comes to the deepest questions of life. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

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Daryl Van Tongeren is a psychologist at Hope College. He's the author of Humble, Free Yourself from the Traps of a Narcissistic World. Daryl, some years ago, you and your wife were heading to dinner for a nice date when something very dramatic happened. Paint me a picture of what happened that evening. So we're at a stoplight on our way to dinner, and we witness very suddenly and unexpectedly a rather severe car accident right in front of us.

Two cars collide and one of the cars rolls into a ditch. I immediately pull the car over and ask my wife to call 911 while I run down and try to assist the other folks who are getting the driver and passengers out of the car that had rolled over. Eventually, when the police and emergency personnel came, they asked everyone to recount what they had seen.

And so everyone was interviewed separately. And after we had given our eyewitness testimony, we headed back to the car and drove off to dinner. And as my wife and I were recounting what we had seen, you know, one of us said, goodness, I can't believe that the pickup truck ran through the red light and hit the van, causing it to roll into the ditch. And the other one of us said, no, no, no. It was the van that ran the red light and hit the pickup truck.

And so we started this argument about which car was at fault and which car hit the other. And we were two people with plain view of what was going on with two totally discrepant accounts of reality that had unfolded just in front of us. How did you settle this argument? Well, we pulled the car over. We went to a Starbucks. We got the salt and pepper shakers and the sugar packets, and we recreated the accident scene right there on the table. Wow.

And in fact, it was still a point of contention where we decided one of us had to be wrong. And so we just decided to leave it just as that. So, of course, what this shows is that perhaps one of the first steps to humility is to recognize that the way we see the world might not actually be the way the world is. Can you talk about this idea, Daryl?

Yeah, so most of the time, I think what we do is we interpret the world through a set of schemas or through a lens in which it confirms our pre-existing beliefs. So even when we encounter mixed evidence or neutral evidence, we tend to think that it affirms the way we want the world to be. And usually we're looking for feedback that either makes us feel better, verifies our pre-existing beliefs, or otherwise enhances our ego or way of seeing the world.

In some ways, this is a subtler form of humility, because I think when most people think about being humble, they think about, you know, not boasting or not talking arrogantly. Most of us don't imagine that, you know, when we look out at the world and we see the world and we tell other people what we're seeing, that that could also in some ways involve an element of arrogance, because we assume, again, that the way we see the world is the way the world actually is.

Right. And we can't imagine that there might be another way in which we could see the world, another set of perspectives that we haven't even considered. Because surely the way I see it is the way it has to be. And my way has to be the right way.

You know, I'm reminded of the study that Lee Ross conducted at Stanford University many decades ago. He brought Israeli students into the lab and Arab students into the lab, or at least supporters of the Israeli and Arab causes, and he showed them clips from major news networks, and he asked them to count the number of anti-Israel and anti-Arab references in the news clips.

And he found that the Israelis counted an enormous number of anti-Israel references in the news clips and the Arabs looking at the very same news clips counted an enormous number of anti-Arab references. And of course, what this shows is that we can all be looking at the same thing, but draw completely different conclusions and each be convinced that the way we see the world has to be the correct way to see the world.

That's absolutely right. And that coincides and confirms a lot of other research that has examined the same type of behavior, whether it's sports teams that are counting the number of fouls committed during a contentious sporting contest.

or the number of so-called points scored by presidential candidates during a debate, each walking away thinking that my candidate won. We both look at the same objective evidence, but we do so rather subjectively in a way that reinforces the way we want the world to be rather than the way the world actually is. And of course, this is not happening just at an interpersonal level. When I think about the

the study that Lee Ross conducted, I'm also now reminded of what's actually happening in the Middle East right now and how on a much larger scale, the same forces are at play in terms of geopolitical conflict, not just interpersonal conflict.

Right. And what I really think this does is it underscores that my own individual humility contributes to my societal humility, which contributes to a larger national or worldwide humility. And we need this humility on so many different levels. I can only work on myself, but working on myself can also contribute to making my community, my society in this world a more humble and hopefully more objectively fair place to live.

And presumably the reverse is also true. You know, my arrogant confidence in my own vision and my own sense of reality probably contributes to the way my society sees things and my nation sees things. Right, because if we circle back to that research about humility is most beneficial when both partners are humble.

And in a dyad, if one partner is arrogant and the other is humble, the humble partner pays the price. If you ratchet up your arrogance, I'm going to likely do the same because I don't want to have to be the one to pay the price. So if I become increasingly more arrogant, other people will too. And it becomes this arms race for arrogance. And then we slowly start losing some of the integrity and civility in our culture.

You say that a key part of humility is being honest with ourselves and others about our flaws and limitations, especially when we haven't lived up to our own values. Some time ago, the actor and podcaster Dax Shepard talked about how he had relapsed into addiction. He had been hiding it from his family, from friends, from his audience, and he had promised his audience to be authentic with them.

When he called a friend, the friend gave him some advice. I want to play you a clip of what Dak said. And he says, you know, your number one character defect is your arrogance. You think you're so much smarter than everybody.

And he said, and I know it because I suffer from the same one, which is true. I never thought I'm not an addict, but I thought I'm a smart enough addict to do this and be smarter than it and come up with a bulletproof game plan. And he said, no.

You know, it's your number one character defect in that, unfortunately, I know the antidote to it, which is humility. And there would be nothing more humbling for you than to ultimately tell everyone, period. And that was terrifying.

So first off, Daryl, you know, hats off to Dax Shepard for acknowledging he had a problem and doing something about it. That took real courage. But I also think what he just said is really true. One reason we turn away from humility is that it can be terrifying.

Yeah, I think that there's this honest vulnerability that comes with humility. If it really is seeing ourselves, strength and weakness, the parts of ourselves that we love, but also the parts of ourselves where we might feel a little bit more ashamed,

That is very vulnerable. That is very scary to admit. We may not be the overly glowing representation of ourselves we hold in our own minds. And we are flawed. We are limited. We are these bounded creatures who hurt each other and who are less noble than we like to imagine. And so the honesty of humility is terrifying and liberating.

And that's why I in part think that humility really is a strength. So a lot of people think of humility as a weakness, but I think that the people who are truly humble, who can demonstrate that security, they're demonstrating a strength to say, I have weaknesses. I'm not perfect. The way I see the world is not perfect. I'm not perfect in my relationships.

And oftentimes, not always, but oftentimes when we show that kind of vulnerability, we are met with compassion or we are met with empathy, maybe even more than we might imagine, which is why we oftentimes try to keep that veneer up. We try to keep that facade and not allow people to see those more shameful parts of ourselves.

You say that our culture pushes us in ways that make it hard to practice humility. You call this the culture's moving sidewalk. Do you have an example of this from your own life, Daryl?

Yeah. So, I mean, every day I wake up, I have to really commit to saying, okay, I'm going to try to be more humble today than I was the day before. Because I think it's very easy whether we get on social media, whether we're trying to promote ourselves professionally, whether we're comparing ourselves athletically or financially to other people, it's very easy to develop a sense of conditional self-worth. And

And so I think for a lot of people that moving sidewalk is conditional self-worth. I'm only good enough if my bank account is this, or my achievements are this, or my travels are this. And what we do is we put our happiness, we put our value in the hands of other people to give us the validation that we so desperately need to say, yes, you are enough. You have traveled enough. You are successful enough in your career. You are cultured or interesting enough.

And really, unless we're actively trying to work against that and free ourselves from that and cultivate an unconditional self-regard where we know that we're inherently worthy and loved and valued and enough in and of ourselves, we're going to fall prey to these narcissistic traps of our culture. And when we do, we stop living according to our values and we start chasing the approval of other people that's always going to be a moving target.

You know, it's interesting. You told me at the start that you grew up in a very religious Christian household. I'm hearing echoes of, you know, may he who is without sin cast the first stone when I hear talk about, you know, let's be open about the things that are wrong with us. Yeah, that's right.

rushing to judging other people, you know, I was taught is just going to bring judgment on yourself, right? Pride comes before the fall, right? God loves the humble but opposes the proud. So those types of things and really just any of the world religions kind of highlighting features of the human condition where we are bounded, where we are a little bit more selfish, where we could do better to become nobler and more thoughtful of our fellow humans really as a path toward

virtuous flourishing and enlightenment. Daryl says that one path to humility is to listen to feedback without becoming defensive. He struggles with this himself. When he was writing his book on humility, he asked his wife for feedback on one of his chapters.

So when I asked her for feedback, she very kindly, thoughtfully sat down with me and said, you know, it's okay, but you could do a lot better. And she really walked through and kind of highlighted the places in the chapter where I wasn't being honest, I wasn't being vulnerable. And in fact, I wasn't bringing my full self to the chapter. So at the end, she's like, you know, it's kind of a mediocre chapter, and it's a rather important one.

I immediately got defensive. I mean, if you're seeing a theme here, she gives me good feedback. I feel insecure. I respond defensively. And so here she is trying to help me improve the chapter. And I respond by not listening to her feedback and telling her, well, I can't do that. And I said it the best way I could. And I don't think you quite understand the research. I mean, the fact that she hung in there with me and still said, I think you can do better is really a testament to her patience and kindness. And truthfully,

Once I kind of set aside my ego and once I apologized for acting so terribly towards her and defensively, I was able to go back and revisit and she was able to talk through and I was able to hear when she was talking through that chapter. And I really reworked that chapter. And in fact, I spent so much more time on that chapter. And since then, I've gotten a number of people who have commented that that chapter, in particular, the sections that my wife offered improvements around are their favorite parts of the book.

And so it's one of those, again, when I'm insecure, I stop listening and I get defensive. But when I'm open to that feedback, it just makes things better. But of course, the other theme that has come up repeatedly in this conversation is that defensiveness is driven by fear and insecurity. It's not just coming from a place of intellectual disagreement. It's coming from a place of emotional fear. That's exactly right. I was afraid. I was insecure. I was defensive about feeling ashamed and embarrassed.

So you say that we can all look for humility role models, people who embody the virtues we'd like to develop in ourselves. In your book, you write about a businessman named Chuck Feeney. What was his story, Daryl?

Chuck Feeney grew up in a working class background, went to Cornell, and then helped found duty-free shoppers. If you've traveled internationally, you've seen these duty-free places where you can buy different merchandise and airports. He amassed, I think it was $8 billion over his lifetime. But what was so impressive about Chuck Feeney was that he gave almost all of it away completely anonymously.

And so some people like to give away money and are perfectly fine with their name attached to it, and some actually want their name attached to it. That's not at all what Chuck wanted. In fact, it was only because of a business deal that required that his identity be made public that anyone realized that he was this kind of...

James Bond of philanthropy, as someone once wrote about him, that he was secretly giving away all of his wealth and living this modest life where he flew coach, ate hamburgers, and lived in an apartment. So why was he doing it? What was his motivation?

My sense of his motivation is that he felt like he had enough and he felt empathically motivated to give towards others, that he had this spirit of generosity. But his spirit of generosity wasn't anchored in wanting to make sure that he got credit for being generous, but it was in this true altruistic sense of, I have enough. I know what it's like not to have enough. I

I empathically can see that what I've earned can change radically the lives of other people, and I want to invest in that, but I don't need the credit. I'm secure enough to know that what I'm doing is good in and of its own right. And so there's that theme again, which is that when we are secure and we feel confident, we don't need in some ways the world to stroke us as we might otherwise. That's absolutely right.

So we talked earlier about the importance of humility in personal relationships. And you say this often involves giving up the desire to be right when we may be trampling on the feelings of other people. You had a fight with your wife in the first year of your marriage when you didn't follow this advice. Can you tell us what happened? Yeah, I think it was probably one of our first actual kind of significant disagreements that we got into.

And as we're starting in this fight, my whole goal in this fight was just to win the fight. So I went from husband into lawyer mode, and I started asking her, well, what about this? And show me the evidence for that and interrogating her memory. And in the end, I quote unquote won the fight, but I did significant damage to the relationship.

And the point, you know, throughout that argument, I was probably belittling and disrespectful and humiliating just to try to win the fight. And in the moment, I lost the entire perspective of the relationship. I lost the point that here's two people. We had just gotten married. We're trying our best to make it work. We're trying to create this new life together.

If she's coming to me with a disagreement, the idea is that we can work collaboratively together to solve this problem. Do you remember what the fight was about? You see, that's the most ironic and terrible thing about it is I can't even remember what it was about. But at the moment, it felt so important to win the fight, even though now and probably in the moment, it was so inconsequential. Yeah. How are you connecting this with the idea of humility? Where does humility come in here, Daryl?

So humility allows me to take that pause and for me to realize that, first of all, I could be wrong, right? So don't go in assuming I'm right and trying to prove my case. Chances are I'm wrong, at least partially wrong.

The second place where humility comes in is it allows me to rein in those impulses and prioritize the well-being of other people. In this case, it would be my wife, or even more broadly, our relationship. So what we can do is we can actually think about our relationship as that

Third thing in the disagreement. So there's me, there's my wife, then there's our relationship. And what am I doing in our disagreement to make sure our relationship stays nourished? Am I staying on task? Am I not bringing up previous fights? Am I not bringing in extraneous people or disagreements with other family members? And then are we trying to just productively solve the problem at hand while respectively and kindly listening to one another?

So I'm wondering, Daryl, in the intervening years, have you tried to do things differently with your wife? What do you try and do when you have this urge to basically prove that you're right in an argument?

So I'm admittedly still not perfect. I'm trying to get better. But some of the things that I do is I will try to pause and I ask myself, what am I feeling so insecure about? Why am I acting so reactively in this moment? Because sometimes my insecurity is not about what's going on in this moment. It's about what that moment represents or something else in my life that's made me feel insecure. And it's coming out in this particular situation or this particular argument. Right.

You know, even just last week, my wife and I were trying to pick out a few things for a home improvement project that we're doing. And we were in the moment and, you know, we started getting into what seemed like an insignificant kind of disagreement about, you know, what size materials we needed for the project. And she said something and I completely disregarded her. And she's like, hey, I don't think you're listening to me. And I was about to respond saying, yes, I am. And I took a moment. I paused and I said, hey, you know what? I'm really sorry.

You're right. I didn't hear you. Can I hear that again? And she and, you know, we worked through it. And then later she said, hey, you know what? You're getting better at this. I appreciate you making an intentional effort to build in a little bit more space and hear me. I can see that you're working on that. Some weeks ago, my daughter and I were out in nature. We were out on a beautiful lake boating late at night with a group of friends.

Our guide was telling us about the constellations in the night sky and how the light we were seeing was coming to us from the distant past because the stars were so far away. I remember thinking that the starlight I was seeing may have begun its journey to Earth long before humans first stepped foot on the planet. It made me reflect on how small we all were, how brief our time is on the planet. In our companion story to this episode, we explore one final dimension to Daryl Van Tongeren's research.

We explore the psychology of existential humility and learn how it can help us transform our lives. That episode is available on our subscription feed, Hidden Brain Plus, and it's titled Asking the Big Questions. If you're already a subscriber, you can listen to that episode right now. If you're not a subscriber, you can sign up by searching for Hidden Brain on Apple Podcasts or by going to apple.co slash hiddenbrain.

If you have an Android phone or are a member of Patreon, you can also access Hidden Brain Plus by going to our Patreon page at support.hiddenbrain.org. Daryl Van Tongeren is a psychologist at Hope College and the author of Humble, Free Yourself from the Traps of a Narcissistic World. Daryl, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain. Thanks so much for having me.

Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Querell, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. If you know someone who might enjoy today's episode, please share it with them. Your word-of-mouth recommendations are vital to helping us connect new listeners with the ideas we explore on Hidden Brain.

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