Religious Differences in Reporting and Expressing Humility

摘要

Humility is a central virtue of many world religions. In this paper, we explored whether religious and nonreligious individuals conceptualize and respond to humility differently. In Study 1, we surveyed 361 students and found that religious participants described themselves as more humble than nonreligious participants. In Study 2, we studied community members in 2 samples (N = 180, Sample A; N = 112, Sample B) using Amazon's Mechanical Turk (mTurk). We found that experimentally priming humility had different effects based on religious affiliation. After receiving criticism about their social attitudes (Sample A) or religious beliefs (Sample B), religious participants primed with humility reported lower retaliatory intentions and nonreligious participants reported greater retaliatory intentions relative to a neutral prime. Moreover, religious individuals more strongly desired to be described as humble. In Study 3 (N = 254), we altered the priming induction to reduce the possibility participants would recall a time of humiliation, and we statistically controlled for embarrassment and shame linked to the recall episode. Doing so eliminated the moderating effect of religious status and revealed a main effect for humility in reducing defensiveness. These findings suggest that religious individuals may prioritize or conceptualize humility differently than nonreligious individuals.