Daryl Van Tongeren's Humble and the Modesty Facet (A5)

Daryl Van Tongeren is a psychologist at Hope College who studies a virtue that has fallen out of fashion: humility. Humble is his argument that it is not weakness or low self-esteem but a specific, trainable stance toward yourself and other people. He is careful to define it against the caricature. In a piece for the John Templeton Foundation he lays it out: "Humility involves knowing yourself (i.e., developing self-awareness), checking yourself (i.e., reducing defensiveness), and going beyond yourself (i.e., cultivating empathy)." The trait he is describing has a home in the Big Five.

The quality he means is the Modesty facet

That facet is Modesty (A5), under Agreeableness, how much you play down your own importance rather than push it forward. A high scorer is uncomfortable taking credit and assumes they are one person among equals. A low scorer is at ease claiming the spotlight and rating themselves above the room. Van Tongeren's point is that high A5 is not thinking badly of yourself; it is holding an accurate view of your strengths without needing everyone else to see them too. It is the golden mean he keeps pointing at, being the right size rather than shrinking or inflating.

This matters because the culture rewards the opposite, and a low-A5 confidence often reads as leadership until it curdles into something colder. Van Tongeren's research keeps finding that humility is the quiet ingredient in the things that actually work: relationships last longer and teams function better. That is not a knock on confidence, and a very high A5 has its own cost, undersold contributions and a hard time advocating for yourself in rooms that reward noise. But the book is a corrective to a world that has confused self-promotion with worth, aimed most usefully at the reader who has been told their whole life to take up more space.

For a reader placing themselves, your A5 is a fair read on how naturally you downplay or advance yourself, and where that helps or costs you. High on it and Van Tongeren is affirming an instinct the culture keeps telling you to override, with evidence that it is worth keeping. Low on it and the useful part is that modesty is a skill, not a personality you are locked out of, and its payoffs are real even if the wiring runs the other way. Where you sit on Modesty tells you which direction you tend to distort your own size, and we take the facet apart in Modesty (A5).

Read the book: Humble: Free Yourself from the Traps of a Narcissistic World by Daryl Van Tongeren.

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