Humility Throughout the Lifespan and a Global Pandemic: Evidence From a Large-Scale Cross-Sectional Study

ObjectiveWe provide a fine-grained portrait of age-graded differences in Humility across the lifespan. Specifically, we shed light on year-by-year differences and explore differences-in-differences in the wake of the COVID pandemic.MethodsWe used large-scale cross-sectional data (n = 2,025,004) and employed multigroup confirmatory factor analysis, ANOVAs, and multilevel modeling to examine mean-score differences in Humility from age 10 to 70 across the entire sample, and for temporal (pre-COVID, COVID) and geographical (9 countries, 6 US states) subsamples.ResultsAcross cultures and geographies, Humility mean scores were lowest in late childhood and rose steadily thereafter. They reached their highest levels in late adulthood and exhibited more erratic patterns around retirement age. In the overall and pre-COVID samples, mean-score differences were most pronounced during the transition from early to middle adulthood. In the COVID sample, similar patterns emerged, though we observed generally higher Humility scores, pronounced adolescent disruption, and the biggest differences between early and middle adulthood.ConclusionsAge-graded trends in Humility aligned fully with some established patterns of personality trait development (i.e., psychological maturation, maturation reversal) and partially with others (i.e., disruption hypothesis). Moreover, the COVID analyses provide preliminary insights into the potential effects of the pandemic on personality development trajectories.