Am I arrogant? Listen to me and we will both become more humble

We report four studies that examine listening as an antecedent of humility. We tested our hypotheses across four experiments (N = 597) using both self-reports and other reports of humility. Study 1 employed a recall task of poor or good listening. Studies 2 and 3 randomly assigned dyads to poor or good listening conditions. Study 4 randomly assigned dyads to good, distracted, or argumentative conditions and revealed that the learning of the listener is the driving mechanism behind the link between listening and humility of the listener. An internal meta-analysis of the results indicated that listening increases humility across all studies, that these effects were present beyond liking, and were strongest on the listener’s humility more than the speaker’s humility. These results confirm that humility can be experimentally activated, and that listening is one of the situational factors that can cultivate humility and contribute to positive psychological outcomes.