The Paradox of Intellectual Humility: A Hidden Pathway to Misplaced Certainty

Intellectual humility (IH) is widely regarded as a cognitive vaccine against misplaced certainty in the information age. Yet a puzzling question remains unresolved: do individuals who clearly acknowledge their own epistemic limits truly remain open to diverse information, or do they merely pursue certainty in a subtler form? Drawing on a sample of 519 Chinese adults, this study employs a four-stage progressive design to examine how intellectual humility shapes information-source decisions. Results reveal that IH is significantly and negatively associated with the breadth of source exposure (β = − 0.126): rather than casting a wide net, high-IH individuals adopt a quality-first strategy, showing a pronounced preference for formal sources (β = 0.189) and a clear avoidance of informal ones (β = − 0.160). More counterintuitively, IH is positively associated with the Need for Cognitive Closure (NFCC; β = 0.139): awareness of one's own ignorance does not breed tolerance for ambiguity but, on the contrary, intensifies the pursuit of certainty. A person-centered cluster analysis further identifies four user typologies, among which the "Certain Dependents," characterized by low IH, high government trust, diminished sense of control, embody the prototypical psychological profile of misplaced certainty. By reconceptualizing intellectual humility from a virtue-theoretic commitment to openness into a meta-cognitive decision mechanism that drives quality-based filtering, this study identifies a second, overlooked pathway to false confidence: the pursuit of certainty springs not only from the blindness of the overconfident, but also from the anxiety of the humble.