Cultural humility
Introduction
The cultural humility of counsellors significantly improves their working alliance with clients, explaining about 60% of the variance, as Zhu, Luke, et al. (2025) revealed. Specifically, in this study, the researchers utilised Amazon Mechanical Turk to recruit adults who were receiving counselling or psychotherapy. Over 600 participants completed the survey. The survey included
- the cultural humility and enactment scale (Zhu et al., 2022), such as “My counsellor is open to changing their views on cultural issues”,
- a short variant of the working alliance inventory, such as “What I am doing in therapy gives me new ways of looking at my problem” (Hatcher & Gillaspy, 2006),
- the real relationship inventory (Kelley et al., 2010) to gauge the quality and sincerity of the relationship between the client and therapist, such as “I was open and honest with my therapist”, and
- the Barrett–Lennard relational inventory to measure whether the client perceived the therapist as empathic, such as “My counsellor usually senses or realizes what I am feeling.”
As hypothesised, cultural humility was positively and strongly associated with both the working alliance and the quality or sincerity of the relationship between the client and therapist. When counsellors and clients have developed a strong working alliance, in which they agree on therapeutic goals and tasks as well as establish an emotional bond, clients are more likely to benefit significantly from the sessions (for a meta-analysis, see Flückiger et al., 2018). The degree to which the therapist was perceived as empathic partly mediated these relationships.
Several accounts could explain why cultural humility enhances the perceived empathy of therapists. For example
- when therapists demonstrate cultural humility, they are more likely to be curious and interested in the client—and this curiosity or interest might foster understanding and empathy,
- when therapists demonstrate cultural humility, they are not as likely to reach premature, and thus misguided, conclusions about clients, again fostering understanding and empathy.
