“Stay humble. Question yourself. Assume you might be wrong.” It’s advice so common in self-improvement writing that nobody bothers to defend it anymore — it’s just there, sitting underneath growth-mindset books, leadership content, and roughly every LinkedIn post about intellectual honesty. A new study out of Wake Forest University, published July 31, 2026 in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, took that advice apart. Not by attacking humility. By splitting it into two things self-help treats as one — and finding they pull in opposite directions.

One kind of humility is about you: awareness of your own intellectual limits, your own fallibility, the ways your own reasoning goes wrong. The other is about everyone else: respecting what other people know, treating their ideas as real sources of insight instead of things to be corrected. Across 4,049 people, the self-focused kind tracked with worse mental health. The other-focused kind tracked with better. Same word, opposite outcomes.

Quick Verdict

Question	Answer
Who ran the study?	Michael Prinzing, Shauna Bowes, Karen Melton, Perry Glanzer, and Sarah Schnitker (Wake Forest University)
Sample	4,049 people total across three studies: 1,123 in a cross-sectional supplement, 400 nationally demographic-matched adults, and 2,526 college students across 14 U.S. universities
What did they measure?	Metacognitive intellectual humility (self-doubt about your own knowledge) vs. interpersonal intellectual humility (respect for others’ knowledge)
What predicted better mental health?	Interpersonal humility — more pleasant feelings, more meaning, fewer depression and anxiety symptoms
What predicted worse mental health?	Metacognitive humility — the opposite pattern on every measure
Was there a “healthy middle ground”?	No. The relationships were linear. More metacognitive humility was worse, all the way down
The catch	Observational, self-report design. Can’t prove causation, and accurately judging your own intellectual limits is itself hard to measure

Bottom line: “Question yourself” and “respect what others know” get filed under the same virtue in most self-help writing. The data says they’re doing opposite jobs.

What the Study Actually Tested

Prinzing’s team didn’t run one study — they ran three, stacked to check the finding from different angles. A 1,123-person supplemental cross-sectional study (596 college students plus 527 adults) got the pattern on the table first. A 400-person study, matched to U.S. national demographics, checked whether it held outside a college sample. Then a 2,526-person longitudinal study across 14 U.S. universities, measured at four time points over two years, checked whether the pattern held when you follow the same people over time instead of comparing different people once.

That’s the part worth sitting with before the findings. A lot of psychology research gets one shot at 300 undergraduates and calls it a day. This is three separate samples, one of them tracked longitudinally for two years, all converging on the same split.

The split itself is the useful part. Intellectual humility isn’t one trait — it’s at least two, and they point in different directions. Metacognitive intellectual humility is self-focused: awareness of the limits of your own knowledge, willingness to admit your own reasoning might be flawed. Interpersonal intellectual humility is other-focused: respecting other people’s ideas and knowledge, treating them as legitimate sources of insight instead of positions to correct. Most self-help language — “stay open-minded,” “assume you could be wrong,” “hold your opinions loosely” — doesn’t distinguish between the two. This study is one of the first to actually test whether that distinction matters for how you feel day to day.

Is Self-Doubt the Same Thing as Humility?

No — according to this research, they’re different constructs with opposite effects on well-being. Humility about what other people know correlated with more pleasant emotion, more meaning, and fewer depression and anxiety symptoms across all three samples. Humility about the limits of your own knowledge correlated with the reverse: less pleasant emotion, less meaning, more anxiety and depression. Turning doubt outward toward respect for others looks healthy. Turning it inward toward self-scrutiny doesn’t.

1. Interpersonal intellectual humility tracked with better outcomes on every well-being measure the study used — pleasant feelings, meaning in life, and lower depression and anxiety scores, consistently across the cross-sectional, demographic-matched, and longitudinal samples.
2. Metacognitive intellectual humility tracked with worse outcomes on the same measures, in the same three samples.
3. The relationship was linear, not curved. There was no point where metacognitive humility flipped from harmful to helpful, and no “moderate amount is healthiest” sweet spot the data supported.

The Part That Should Worry Growth-Mindset Advice

Here’s where it gets uncomfortable for a specific strain of self-improvement content: the kind that treats self-doubt as a discipline to cultivate. Assume you’re wrong more often. Interrogate your own certainty. Stay suspicious of your own confidence. It’s framed as intellectual maturity — the mark of someone who’s outgrown ego and defensiveness.

Prinzing’s own framing of the finding is blunt about the risk. Per PsyPost’s coverage of the study, he said: “Metacognitive intellectual humility does not feel good, and increasing it could lead to inadvertent reductions in mental health and well-being.” That’s not a hedge. That’s a researcher naming an ethical problem with his own field’s advice — telling people to be more aware of their own limitations might, on this data, be making them worse off.

His alternative isn’t “stop being humble.” It’s aim the humility somewhere else. Per the same coverage, Prinzing points toward encouraging “people to engage with others in a way that respects their ideas and treats them as potential sources of knowledge and insight” — humility as an orientation toward other people’s minds, not a running audit of your own.

That’s a meaningfully different instruction than most self-help gives. “Stay humble” as commonly written is a self-directed command: watch yourself, doubt yourself, stay small about your own certainty. This study suggests the version worth practicing is other-directed: take other people’s knowledge seriously. Those aren’t the same habit, and coaching someone toward the first one when you meant the second might be actively counterproductive.

Where This Fits With What This Site Keeps Finding

This isn’t a one-off. A 1,108-person study on comparing yourself to your partner found the same shape — a behavior self-help treats as a single bad habit turned out to split into two versions with opposite effects, depending on what the comparison was actually doing. The gender personality gap research did something similar with a trait assumed to be fixed and universal. A pattern is forming across this kind of research: self-help collapses distinctions that turn out to matter, and the collapse is usually where the bad advice lives.

It also complicates the growth-mindset pitch in Adam Grant’s Hidden Potential, which leans on the idea that acknowledging what you don’t know is the doorway to improvement. That’s not wrong, exactly — but this study suggests the doorway needs a specific shape. Acknowledging what other people know opens it. Running a constant internal audit of your own limitations doesn’t, and may close it. Kristin Neff’s self-compassion research points at something related from a different angle: self-criticism dressed up as self-improvement tends to cost more than it delivers, even when the self-criticism sounds reasonable on paper.

The 122-expert consensus study on what “well-being” actually means is useful context here too. That study found well-being breaks into 19 distinct dimensions that don’t move together — which is exactly the kind of finding that predicts a result like this one. If well-being isn’t a single dial, there’s no reason a single-sounding virtue like “humility” should move it in one direction either.

What This Doesn’t Mean

A few things this study does not establish, worth naming before this gets oversimplified in either direction:

• It doesn’t mean self-awareness is bad. Metacognitive intellectual humility specifically means dwelling on your own fallibility and limits — not the same thing as basic self-knowledge or the ability to notice when you’re wrong about something concrete.
• It doesn’t prove metacognitive humility causes worse mental health. The design is observational and self-report. People who already feel anxious or depressed may simply rate their own intellectual limitations more harshly — the arrow could run either direction, or both.
• It doesn’t mean you should stop questioning your own beliefs entirely. The study measured a self-focused disposition correlated with well-being, not whether occasionally checking your reasoning against evidence is useful. Those are different claims.
• It doesn’t settle what “accurately humble” even looks like. The paper itself flags that judging your own intellectual limitations accurately is a genuinely hard thing to measure — which means some of what gets scored as “high metacognitive humility” might really be something closer to rumination or self-doubt that isn’t calibrated to anything real.

What Actually Holds Up, Given This

• If a book’s advice for “staying humble” is entirely about doubting yourself, treat that as incomplete rather than wrong. The healthier half of humility, per this data, runs toward respecting what other people know — not toward auditing your own certainty on a loop.
• Notice the difference between “I might be wrong” as a one-time check and “I might be wrong” as a standing mental posture. The first is useful calibration. The second is closer to what this study found correlated with worse outcomes.
• Respecting someone else’s expertise costs you nothing and, per this research, correlates with feeling better. That’s a low-effort adjustment worth making regardless of what else you take from the study.
• Be skeptical of any framework that treats “humility” as a single dial to turn up. This is now direct evidence that at least one popular version of the advice — encouraging people to dwell on their own fallibility — comes with a well-being cost the framework doesn’t mention.

The Bottom Line

Three studies, 4,049 people, one consistent split: doubting your own knowledge tracks with worse mental health, while respecting other people’s knowledge tracks with better. Self-help has spent years telling people to do more of both under the same banner. This is the first large, multi-sample evidence that the banner is hiding two different behaviors with two different price tags. If you’re going to practice humility, the research points toward aiming it outward — not turning it into another reason to doubt yourself.

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Prinzing, M. M., Bowes, S. M., Melton, K., Glanzer, P., & Schnitker, S., “Metacognitive and Interpersonal Intellectual Humility Are Asymmetrically Associated with Well-Being,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, July 31, 2026. Additional coverage from PsyPost and Behavioral Healthcare Network. Related reading: Comparing Yourself to Your Partner Isn’t Always Bad, The Gender Personality Gap Is Shrinking Fast, Adam Grant’s Hidden Potential Review, Self-Compassion by Kristin Neff Review, and 122 Experts Just Agreed on What “Well-Being” Means.