  Attention accounts of modesty see it as rooted in patterns of motivated conscious attention. Bommarito (2013) argues that being modest is a matter of motivated inattention to one’s own good qualities and attention to external factors that brought them about. It’s not that the modest person doesn’t know about their good qualities, it’s that they don’t think about them very often. And when they do think about them, they tend to emphasize the role of situational factors in bringing them about, emphasizing things like having good teachers, supportive parents, or fortunate circumstances. A similar proposal is hinted at by Hastings Rashdall when he describes immodesty as “… habitual dwelling with satisfaction upon one’s own capacities or one’s own merits” (1907, 205).