Humility Versus Humiliation

On humility.

The new professionalism movement in medical education takes seriously the old medical virtues. Perhaps the most difficult virtue to understand and practice is humility, which seems out of place in a medical culture characterized by arrogance, assertiveness, and a sense of entitlement. Countercultural though it is, humility need not suggest weakness or lack of self-confidence. On the contrary, h...

The Humiliation Dynamic

The Fear of Humiliation

A good friend of mine declined a wedding invitation recently although he would very much liked to have accepted. He had no other prior engage-ment?if he had, he would have broken it willingly ?he just did not have a dark grey suit and had no money to buy or hire one?being a student, he has a very limited income. Although his friends, and the couple getting married, said it didn't matter what he...

Is humility a sentiment?

Gervais & Fessler reintroduce the concept of a sentiment as a framework for conceptualizing contempt, a construct with both attitudinal and emotional components. We propose that humility might also fit this mold. We review recent findings regarding the antecedents, phenomenology, and functional consequences of humility, and discuss why conceptualizing it as a sentiment may advance our understan...

Affective Dimensions of Intergroup Humiliation

Despite the wealth of theoretical claims about the emotion of humiliation and its effect on human relations, there has been a lack of empirical research investigating what it means to experience humiliation. We studied the affective characteristics of humiliation, comparing the emotional experience of intergroup humiliation to two other emotions humiliation is often confused with: anger and sha...