Intellectual Humility: Say This Instead of "I Don't Know"

I used to think I was being honest. Every time a conversation hit a hard question — something I didn't have a clean answer for — I'd say "I don't know" and move on. It felt like the most intellectually honest thing to do. Intellectual humility, I assumed, meant admitting you don't have all the answers. No pretending. No bluffing. Just a clean admission and a quick redirect to safer ground.

Then a colleague said something after a meeting that I still haven't forgotten. "You end conversations," she told me. Not unkindly. Just as a fact. And she was right. The moment I said "I don't know," whatever thread we'd been pulling on — together — went slack. We'd stand there for a beat, then change the subject. The question that had actually mattered quietly died on the floor.

The research nobody told you about

In 2017, Mark Leary and colleagues at Duke University published a paper in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin with a title that sounds academic and a finding that is genuinely unsettling: "Cognitive and Interpersonal Features of Intellectual Humility."

Their starting point was a question that sounds simple: what, exactly, is intellectual humility — and what does it actually do to the quality of a person's thinking?

The answer wasn't what most people expect. Intellectual humility, as Leary and the team defined it, isn't about lacking confidence. It isn't about being wishy-washy or constantly second-guessing yourself in public. It's something more specific: the ability to hold your own beliefs with an accurate awareness of their fallibility. You can still be confident. You just stay genuinely engaged with evidence that might change your mind.

That sounds simple. In practice, it turns out to be remarkably rare.

What Leary's research found next is where things get uncomfortable. People who scored higher on the team's validated intellectual humility measure didn't just hold beliefs more lightly. They evaluated arguments more evenhandedly. In one of the studies, participants higher in intellectual humility were more attuned to the actual strength of persuasive arguments and rated balanced arguments more favorably than one-sided ones — meaning they were less likely to dismiss the other side's best points simply because those points came from the "wrong" side.

Less hostile toward disagreement. More willing to revise. More able to separate the quality of an argument from who was making it.

What "I don't know" is actually communicating

Here's the part that bothered me most when I first read this research: the flat, three-word admission I thought was honest is, in practice, a kind of withdrawal.

When you say "I don't know" and leave it there, you're not just acknowledging a gap. You're signaling that the gap is a wall. The inquiry is over. There's nothing more to explore here, nothing to reason through together, no provisional thinking worth sharing. The conversation can wrap up now.

The person on the other side hears this. They don't always name it — my colleague was unusually direct — but they feel it. The energy drops. Both of you instinctively move to fill the silence with something easier.

A provisional answer is entirely different. "I'm not sure, but I think..." or "I haven't worked this out yet — my instinct is..." does something structurally opposite. It signals that the gap is open territory, not a dead end. There's something worth staying in the room for.

The mechanism Leary and the team proposed is this: a flat "I don't know" forecloses the very engagement that would let a belief actually update. The inquiry ends before any new information can get in. A curious admission of uncertainty, on the other hand, keeps the process alive — and that openness is, quite literally, what intellectual humility is in practice.

See also: Asking better questions — the science of what actually makes conversations go deeper

The people who were already doing this (without knowing why)

Think about the smartest person you've worked alongside closely — not the most credentialed, but the one whose thinking you most wanted to be around. The one who, when a hard question came up, didn't retreat to certainty or cave immediately to whatever the room seemed to want.

My bet is they had a specific habit. They'd say something like: "I'm not sure I've thought this through completely, but..." and then they'd actually think it through, out loud, in front of you. Not performing uncertainty. Not hedging to avoid being wrong. Just genuinely working through something they hadn't fully resolved.

Leary's research gives that habit a name and a mechanism. In one of the studies in the 2017 paper, people higher in intellectual humility were less inclined to view someone who changed their position — a politician who shifted a stated view, for instance — as simply "flip-flopping." They read belief revision as a reasonable response to new information rather than as weakness or inconsistency. That's a meaningful signal about how intellectually humble people relate to changing their own minds, too: not because they lacked conviction, but because they'd already built in the expectation that their current view might not be the last word. They weren't attached to being right in a particular moment. They were attached to actually figuring something out.

This is a meaningful distinction. The person who caves the moment someone pushes back isn't showing intellectual humility. Neither is the person who agrees with everyone to keep the peace. Those are social strategies, not epistemic ones. Intellectual humility, in Leary's definition, requires staying engaged with evidence and argument — which sometimes means updating, and sometimes means holding your ground because the counter-argument genuinely isn't that compelling.

It's not softness. It's precision.

The specific situations where this goes wrong

There are three contexts where I've watched the "I don't know" reflex do the most damage.

In a performance review or feedback conversation. Someone raises something you haven't thought about. Your instinct is to either defend immediately or retreat with "I'm not sure, I'd have to think about that" — and then never return to it. The intellectually humble move is to stay: "I haven't considered it from that angle. Tell me more about what you're seeing."

In a disagreement with someone you respect. When someone you think is smart believes something you haven't examined carefully, "I don't know" is the easy exit. It feels like leaving space for them. What it actually does is prevent you from ever discovering whether they're right and you should update — or whether your instinct was sound all along.

In your own internal reasoning. This is the one nobody talks about. When you hit a question in your own thinking that you can't easily resolve, the temptation is to file it under "unanswered" and move on. Leary's research suggests that the habit of staying with genuine uncertainty — provisionally — is what actually allows a belief to develop properly over time.

See also: A daily writing habit for clearer thinking — why putting words to uncertainty actually works

The thread connecting all three: a flat "I don't know" hands the inquiry back to the room with nothing added. A provisional engagement keeps it alive. And keeping it alive is the whole game.

Why you think certainty makes you sound smarter

There's a specific illusion at work here, and Leary's research is unusually direct about it.

People who score lower on intellectual humility tend to believe their case-by-case judgment is sound. They feel confident they're evaluating arguments fairly. The data suggests otherwise: they show a pattern of being more swayed by one-sided arguments and less attuned to genuine argument quality — not because the ideas are worse, but because the source or the direction of the challenge triggers a defensive response.

High intellectual humility people aren't just less defensive. They're better at seeing which arguments are actually good, regardless of whose side those arguments favor. That's the payoff. Not appearing more open. Actually being a more accurate thinker.

Adam Grant documented something similar in Think Again — the pattern he calls the "rethinking cycle," where people who are willing to doubt their own knowledge move through doubt, curiosity, and discovery instead of clinging to a fixed position, and end up genuinely better at updating on new information than people who protect a confident self-image. Leary's research adds the specific mechanism: intellectual humility is what makes the rethinking cycle actually run.

What makes certainty feel like intelligence, I think, is the short-term reward. In a meeting, a quick confident answer feels authoritative. People nod. The moment lands. You look like you know things. But over time, in any relationship that matters — a team, a partnership, a mentorship — the person who stays genuinely curious about what they don't know builds something the confident-sounding person doesn't: a track record of actually being right more often.

You can't course-correct a belief you've publicly claimed not to have.

How to start today

The practice here isn't complicated. It's just uncomfortable until it becomes habit.

Step 1: Notice the reflex. For the next week, pay attention to every time you say "I don't know" and immediately change the subject. Don't judge it. Just count. You'll probably be surprised how often it happens.

Step 2: Replace the phrase, not the honesty. You're not trying to fake certainty you don't have. You're trying to stay in the room after admitting a gap. "I haven't thought about this carefully, but my instinct is..." is honest and keeps the conversation going. "I'm not sure — what's your read?" does the same thing and adds a genuine inquiry.

Step 3: Keep a thinking journal. This is the one that compounds. When you hit a hard question and you genuinely don't know, write it down and sit with it. Not to perform reflection — but because the act of writing out your provisional thinking surfaces what you actually believe, and gives it somewhere to develop. A good journal doesn't just record thoughts. It finishes them.

Step 4: Build a reading practice around evidence-review. One of the consistent findings in Leary's broader research is that intellectually humble people read differently — they actively seek out the strongest version of a view they disagree with, rather than only the version that's easiest to dismiss. That's a skill, and it's one that builds with deliberate practice over months, not days.

See also: Books that change how you think — the best self-help books of 2026

Step 5: Audit a belief you've held without revisiting. Pick one thing you're confident about and ask: when did I last actually examine this? What's the best argument against it? Can I state that argument fairly? If you can't, you don't actually know what you believe — you just know the conclusion.

The real reason this matters

There's a version of intellectual humility that gets confused with low self-esteem, or with constantly second-guessing yourself in public, or with being the person who never takes a stand. That's not what Leary's research describes and it's not what the best thinkers I've ever worked alongside actually do.

What the research describes is something quieter and more durable. It's the willingness to hold a belief firmly while keeping the back door open — specifically the door that leads to evidence you haven't seen yet, arguments you haven't heard properly, or angles you haven't thought through. It's staying in the conversation even when you don't have the answer, because you know that staying is exactly how you eventually get one.

That's what "Design Your Evolution" means in practice. Not the dramatic pivot. Not the sudden revelation. The patient, honest willingness to keep working a question long past the point where it would have been easier to file it away.

The next time a conversation hits a wall and you feel "I don't know" ready to end it — stay. See what's on the other side of that gap. That's where the interesting thinking lives.

What's one belief you're currently holding that you haven't examined in a while? What would it take to actually look at the other side of it?