Think about the last time someone gave you advice that actually helped. There’s a decent chance that person knew less about your situation than you did and had never been through anything much like it. What made the conversation useful was that they were in no hurry to tell you what to do.

That isn’t how most people picture wisdom. The wise friend is usually envisioned as the one with the most life behind them, someone whose experience has hardened into answers that other people can borrow.

Research on wise reasoning points somewhere else. Psychologists who study wisdom empirically are less interested in what a person knows than in how they handle the parts of a picture they can’t see. Wisdom in that sense is closer to a stance than a possession , which is why the same person can reason wisely in one moment and badly in the next.

Two habits show up in people whose counsel turns out to be worth having.

Habit 1: They Ask About The Problem Before They Answer It

Imagining someone’s point of view doesn’t reliably make you more accurate about what they actually think. The mind you end up picturing is mostly assembled out of your own assumptions.

Researchers draw a distinction here between perspective-taking and perspective-getting. Getting someone’s perspective means asking them what’s going on and then staying quiet long enough to hear the answer. It’s a small thing that most people skip. A 2021 study published in Frontiers in Communication found that in two of three experiments, asking led to better predictions about what another person thought. The problem was that only a small share of people did it thoroughly, and that feeling confident made them less likely to bother.

Say a friend mentions she’s thinking about quitting her job. Most listeners begin forming a position immediately and have one ready within a minute. A more useful response is a question about what part of her current job she keeps thinking about when she can’t sleep. Her answer often changes the problem. She may not be weighing a career move at all. She may be trying to work out whether she’s allowed to want a different kind of life.

This is why good advice can feel slow. The questions aren’t a courtesy before the real conversation starts. They’re how the person giving advice finds out what the problem actually is.

Habit 2: They Are Honest About How Little They Know

The second habit is intellectual humility, which isn’t the same thing as self-doubt. As a 2022 review published in Nature Reviews Psychology describes it, it’s the recognition that your knowledge has limits and that your beliefs might be wrong . In practice, that means having a reasonably accurate sense of how much anyone can know about a life they’re watching from the outside.

Every piece of advice is a prediction about how someone’s future will go. Predictions about human lives are unreliable, and people who advise well speak like they know that. They tend to say what they’d keep an eye on, and where they think they might be wrong.

Confident advisers tend to be read as more expert, and that’s one of the more durable findings in research on how people weigh input from others. But a 2025 study published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes found that this can reverse: among more reflective listeners, high confidence read as a signal of incompetence, unless the situation was one where certainty was warranted.

That work looked at forecasters rather than friends, but the underlying point remains the same. Being believed and being helpful aren’t the same outcome, and confidence built on partial information can push someone firmly in a direction that doesn’t suit them.

A hedged answer also does something a verdict can’t. It leaves the thinking to the person who has to live with the result. They keep working on the problem instead of either following instructions or arguing back.

What These 2 Habits Share

Both habits reduce how much room the adviser takes up. One replaces guessing with asking. The other replaces the performance of certainty with an honest account of it.

Advice that arrives within seconds, fully formed and wrapped inside a story about the person giving it, is often meeting their need rather than yours. That need is ordinary and mostly well-meant. Wanting to be useful to someone you care about is not a character flaw, which is exactly why it’s so hard to catch in yourself.

Researchers have documented this for over a decade under the name Solomon’s paradox. People reason more wisely about a friend’s dilemma than about an identical one in their own life. When the problem is your own, you lose the wider, beyond-yourself vantage point you bring to someone else’s. Distance is doing most of the work. It’s easy to hold a situation loosely when it isn’t yours.

That suggests these habits are worth turning inward. When you’re stuck on something, the more helpful move is usually to ask yourself the question you’d ask a friend, and then to sit with the fact that you don’t yet know how it turns out.

Wonder whether you’re really hearing people out, or defaulting to your habit of waiting for your turn to weigh in? Find out how accurately you read the people around you with this science-inspired test: Emotional Quotient Inventory