Humility is having a good run. It turns up on lists of leadership qualities, in advice about aging well, and in the reassurance people offer a friend who has just been passed over for someone louder. The claim is nearly always the same: humility is quietly a strength.
The research here supports a narrower picture. In one five-study project, humility scores were associated with general knowledge but not cognitive ability, while results on metacognitive accuracy were mixed. Some apparent costs also depended on which humility scale was used.
More knowledge, no more ability
The clearest evidence comes from five studies by Elizabeth Krumrei-Mancuso, Megan Haggard, Jordan LaBouff and Wade Rowatt, published in The Journal of Positive Psychology as Links between intellectual humility and acquiring knowledge. Across 1,189 participants, people who scored higher on intellectual humility knew more. They performed better on tests of general knowledge.
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They did not perform better on tests of cognitive ability. That association was simply absent. And in one of the studies, the intellectually humble participants had slightly lower college grades than their more intellectually confident peers.
Hold those three results together, but do not treat them as one causal sequence. They came from different studies using different samples and measures. The project does not show that humility produced greater knowledge or lower grades, and the lower-GPA result came from one Honors College sample using a particular “not-a-know-it-all” scale.
What it appears to be doing instead
The same research found that intellectually humble people were less likely to claim knowledge they did not have. That is a modest thing to measure and a substantial thing to live alongside. It is the difference between the relative who knows how the new rule works and the relative who thinks they know and says so.
A separate study points the same direction. Samantha Deffler, Mark Leary and Rick Hoyle ran a recognition memory task and reported in Personality and Individual Differences that higher intellectual humility went with better discrimination between material participants had genuinely seen and material they had not. Their response bias was no different, which matters. They were not simply hedging on everything. They were more accurate on the specific question of what had actually happened.
That is a useful way to think about the whole literature. The measured benefit of humility is not a bigger engine. It is a better fuel gauge.
The cost that rarely makes the list
In Study 1 of that five-study project, higher scores on one intellectual-humility scale were associated with underestimating cognitive ability. The result was not demonstrated across every measure or study, and the authors cautioned that this scale might partly capture lower intellectual confidence or “intellectual servility.”
That makes the evidence less symmetrical than a simple confident-overshoot, humble-undershoot story. One study found underestimation; another found less overclaiming of nonexistent knowledge. Because they used different samples and humility measures, they do not establish that intellectually humble people generally underrate themselves.
That is worth saying plainly to anyone who has spent a career being the one who says “I might be wrong about this” while a more certain colleague was promoted. The self-doubt is not evidence of a smaller mind. It is also not free.
The half that happens between two people
Most of the appeal of humility is not really about knowledge. It is about what living with someone is like.
Daryl Van Tongeren, Don Davis, Joshua Hook and Charlotte vanOyen Witvliet describe humility in Current Directions in Psychological Science as two things at once: a relatively accurate view of yourself, and an orientation toward the needs and well-being of other people. Their social bonds hypothesis holds that humility earns its keep in forming, maintaining and repairing relationships, and that people are more willing to start a relationship with someone they perceive as humble in the first place.
Toni Antonucci, Kristine Ajrouch and Noah Webster of the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research publicly described a survey-based analysis of 284 couples in the Detroit metropolitan area. Each partner rated their own humility, their partner’s humility, and willingness to forgive after being hurt. People who saw their partner as humble reported greater willingness to forgive, while people who saw their partner as arrogant reported less. The result available here is the researchers’ public account rather than a full peer-reviewed report, so the methods and analyses cannot be assessed in the same detail as the journal articles cited elsewhere in this piece.
This is an association in survey data, not a demonstration that becoming humbler will get you forgiven. But it locates the effect somewhere specific. The humility that showed up in this result is humility as it registered with the other person in the house.
The problem with asking people how humble they are
Humility itself was measured largely through questionnaires or partner ratings, even when outcomes such as cognitive ability, general knowledge and recognition memory were performance-based. A questionnaire about humility has an obvious structural flaw. Van Tongeren and colleagues name it themselves: the long-standing worry that a high self-reported humility score might indicate the opposite. The field’s response has been to add other-reports and behavioral measures rather than to trust the self-rating alone.
The Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science records that researchers still disagree about what the core of intellectual humility even is, and that recent work questions what the scales measure, including a finding that intellectual humility questionnaires failed to predict metacognitive skill.
The 2022 review in Nature Reviews Psychology by Tenelle Porter and colleagues is direct about the remaining limits. Much of this work is correlational, so confounds are live. The samples are overwhelmingly Western, educated and wealthy. Attempts to raise intellectual humility experimentally used small to medium samples and have mostly not been replicated. In their own words, intellectual humility is not a panacea, and high levels of it are unlikely to benefit everyone in every situation. A hospital at three in the morning is not the moment for it.
What is left standing
A narrower claim than the slogan, and a more useful one. Some humility measures are associated with less overclaiming and better discrimination in a recognition-memory task, while a survey-based couple result associates perceived partner humility with willingness to forgive. None of these findings demonstrates that humility caused the outcomes. We have looked before at the case for humility in leadership; the evidence here is better read as a set of measured associations than as one general advantage.
One open question raised by the five-study project is whether some scales blend intellectual humility with low confidence. Until measures separate those cleanly, claims that humility both improves accuracy and makes people underrate their ability should remain tentative.