"Humbling" Experiences?
I'm packing up now for a vacation until the 17th (to see relatives and friends in Maryland and Florida). I'll try to keep posting (and Dan Haybron is still mid-run as a guest blogger), but since I don't have access to my books and articles, things will be a little less formal.
Informally, then: If I ever I receive a major award, then maybe I'll know what's on people's minds when they call such awards "humbling" (Google humbling award for some examples). On the face of it, receiving awards seems generally to be the opposite of humbling. Nobel Prize and Academy Award receipients aren't, as a class, the humblest of folks. Nor do winners of lesser awards (various academic prizes, for example) seem generally to made more humble by the experience. (A friend of mine went on a blind date with a winner of a MacArthur Fellowship. He handed her his business card, with "certified genius" embossed on it! Unfortunately, she forget to ask for his autograph.)
Let's assume, then, that -- unlike truly humbling experiences -- winning awards doesn't make one humble. Yet the phrase is so common, I suspect there's something to it. Momentarily, at least, one can feel humbled by an award.
Here's my thought: If I receive an award that puts me in elevated company or that represents a very high appraisal of me by a group I respect, there may be a mismatch between my self-conception and the conception that others seem to have of me. My sense that I don't quite deserve to belong may be experienced as something like humility. However, ordinarily that feeling will pass. I'll adjust my self-conception upward; I'll slowly start to think of myself in terms of the award (since I'm so impressed by it!); it will be hard for me not to think less of those who haven't reached such heights.
Perversely, then, it may be exactly those people who are inclined to think of an award as "humbling" who are made less humble by attaining it. Those who were already arrogant will be unchanged -- they knew they deserved the award all along, and it's about time! And the type of person who is deeply, intrinsically humble (if there are any such people) may not be sufficiently inclined to see the award as a legitimate mark of comparison between oneself and other folks to have any striking experience of humility -- any "wow, me?!" -- in the face of it.