Common Humanity and Resilience: A Scoping Review

Objectives: Social support and self-compassion are well-established predictors of resilience across diverse populations and contexts. While the associations between resilience and both social support and self-compassion are well documented in the literature, common humanity—a subcomponent of self-compassion related to social support that involves recognizing the universality of painful experiences—has received comparatively little attention in resilience research. Accordingly, a scoping review was conducted to map the empirical literature on common humanity and resilience, synthesize their associations, and examine definitions and conceptualizations of both constructs.Methods: To identify studies, a search strategy was developed and executed across seven databases. The titles and abstracts as well as the full texts of emerging publications were independently screened by three reviewers. Data from 40 studies that met the inclusion criteria by consensus were extracted and summarized.Results: Among the 4,353 references identified, findings from 40 included studies indicate a consistent positive relationship between common humanity and resilience, with higher common humanity associated with more effective coping, adaptation, and recovery from adversity. Regardless of the definitions and conceptualizations of both common humanity and resilience—as well as differences in geographic location, research type, study population, sample size, or form of adversity under investigation—common humanity consistently evidenced a robust association with resilience. Nevertheless, this relationship varied depending on the constructs examined, the form of adversity studied, the underlying mechanisms, and the conceptualizations of common humanity. These results elucidate the association between common humanity and resilience while identifying the factors that shape this relationship.Conclusions: This scoping review advances knowledge in the field by identifying conceptual and methodological gaps, offering a foundation for future research, and informing the development of interventions that draw on common humanity to enhance resilience.Preregistration A review protocol was developed a priori and registered on the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/rby8e/).Keywords: Common humanity, resilience, adaptation, adversity, scoping review