What is Cultural Humility?
Cultural humility is a lifelong commitment to self-evaluation and critique, to redressing power imbalances, and to developing mutually beneficial and non-paternalistic partnerships with individuals and communities from diverse cultural backgrounds. Unlike cultural competence—which often implies mastery of knowledge about other cultures—cultural humility focuses on a lifelong commitment to self-evaluation and self-critique, recognizing that no practitioner can ever be fully “competent” in another person’s lived experience.
At its core, cultural humility involves three interconnected dimensions: lifelong learning and self-reflection; mitigating power imbalances; and institutional accountability. It begins not with studying “other” cultures, but with examining one’s own beliefs, cultural identities, and the privileges or disadvantages these confer. Cultural humility does not focus on competence or confidence and recognizes that the more you are exposed to cultures different from your own, you often realize how much you don’t know about others.
Origins & Lineage
Cultural humility is a term coined by Melanie Tervalon and Jann Murray-Garcia in 1998, when they published their landmark paper “Cultural Humility Versus Cultural Competence: A Critical Distinction in Defining Physician Training Outcomes in Multicultural Education” in the Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved (May 1998, Volume 9, Number 2, pages 117-125). The concept of cultural humility was developed by Melanie Tervalon and Jann Murray-Garcia in 1998 to address inequities in the healthcare field.
The concept emerged from the authors’ clinical work at Children’s Hospital Oakland and the University of California, San Francisco, respectively, during a period when U.S. healthcare was grappling with increasing cultural, racial, and ethnic diversity. With the increasing diversity in the United States combined with an added cultural awareness, competence was not serving the needs of all medical professionals. Tervalon and Murray-García argued that the traditional notion of competence in clinical training as a detached mastery of a theoretically finite body of knowledge may not be appropriate for this area of physician education.
Since 1998, the framework has expanded far beyond medicine. By 2019, Tervalon and Murray-García’s (1998) original article alone had been cited in over 1,500 peer reviewed articles. It is now used in many fields, including education, public health, social work, and library science, to increase the quality of interactions across cultural lines.
How It’s Practiced
Practicing cultural humility looks and feels fundamentally different from checkbox-based diversity training. It manifests as a stance—an interpersonal orientation—rather than a skillset to be acquired and completed.
Self-Reflection and Critical Consciousness: Cultural humility is a lifelong process of self-reflection and self-critique whereby the individual not only learns about another’s culture, but one starts with an examination of her/his own beliefs and cultural identities. This involves ongoing interrogation of one’s assumptions, privileges, and the cultural contexts that have shaped one’s worldview.
Addressing Power Imbalances: A desire to fix power imbalances involves recognizing that each person brings something different to an interaction and has something valuable to contribute. In clinical, educational, or service settings, this means bringing into check the power imbalances that exist in the dynamics of physician-patient communication by using patient-focused interviewing and care. Cultural humility recognizes that clients are the experts on their own lives.
Active Listening and Openness: The elements of self-questioning, immersion into an individual patient’s point of view, active listening, and flexibility all serve to confront and address cultural biases or assumptions. Practitioners enter relationships with genuine curiosity rather than pre-formed cultural scripts.
Institutional Responsibility: Cultural humility is not solely an individual practice. The discussion takes into account core constructs that signpost the path to cultural safety and recognises the role and accountability of all levels of the healthcare system, not merely the practitioner.
Cultural Humility Today
Cultural humility has become central to professional training across healthcare, education, and social services. The health-care sector has adopted cultural humility training as central to a high standard of patient and community care. Medical schools, nursing programs, social work curricula, and public health graduate programs now incorporate cultural humility workshops, standardized patient scenarios, and reflection-based learning modules.
In spiritual and conscious communities, cultural humility principles increasingly inform retreat facilitation, teacher training, and group facilitation. Teachers and event organizers engage cultural humility when they acknowledge their own cultural conditioning, share power in group processes, and honor participants as authorities on their own experiences. Some programs integrate yoga and forest therapy, recommended as effective intervention tools in fostering mindsight and cultural humility.
Online resources include the widely-used 2012 video featuring Vivian Chavez, Melanie Tervalon, and Jann Murray-García, which has become a standard teaching tool in professional education. Workshops, continuing education modules, and community-based training programs emphasize experiential learning rather than didactic instruction.
Common Misconceptions
Cultural humility is not a softer or less rigorous alternative to cultural knowledge. It does not mean refusing to learn about histories, traditions, or structural inequities affecting specific communities. Rather, it reframes how one holds that knowledge—with openness to correction, awareness of individual variation, and recognition that lived experience supersedes generalized information.
It is not cultural relativism or an abdication of ethical responsibility. When we practice cultural humility, we don’t consider our lens to be better than anyone else’s lens or treat anyone’s experience as less than ours, yet this does not preclude addressing harm or advocating for justice.
It is not an endpoint or certificate one earns. Cultural humility is not an outcome; rather, it is a process that involves a “way of being” and necessitates a growth mindset and lifelong learning. There is no mastery, only ongoing engagement.
Cultural humility does not replace cultural competence in all contexts. Best practice currently supports leveraging multiple forms of cultural responsiveness—both cultural competence and cultural humility together—to advance health equity. Knowledge about histories of oppression, health disparities, and cultural practices remains essential; humility is the posture with which one holds and applies that knowledge.
How to Begin
Start with self-examination: Before learning about others, examine your own cultural identities, privileges, and biases. Ask: What cultural assumptions do I bring into interactions? Where do I hold unearned advantages? What communities or perspectives have been absent from my education and social circles?
Read foundational texts: Begin with Tervalon and Murray-García’s 1998 article, available through academic libraries or public health repositories. Pair it with contemporary work in critical consciousness, anti-oppressive practice, or decolonization relevant to your field or spiritual tradition.
Engage in reflective practice: Journaling, supervision, peer consultation, and contemplative practices can support ongoing self-reflection. Engagement with the humanities, for example, literature, art, or poetry, may be encouraged. Reading a book that explores another culture may enable us to reflect on our own reactions rather than simply cataloging information.
Seek training with experienced facilitators: Look for workshops or courses led by practitioners with deep backgrounds in equity work—especially those from marginalized communities who center lived experience alongside theory. Avoid one-off trainings that promise quick solutions.
Practice in relationship: Cultural humility cannot be learned in isolation. Engage in partnerships, coalitions, or service relationships that invite you to listen, share power, and be accountable to communities different from your own.
Accept discomfort: Humility requires courage and flexibility. Growth involves recognizing past harm, sitting with uncertainty, and revising long-held beliefs. This discomfort is not a sign of failure but evidence of genuine learning.