Hedging is a competence signal that reads as weakness

The verbal habits of careful thinking are exactly the habits an audience discounts.

Careful people talk in a recognisable way. They say probably and roughly, they distinguish what is well established from what is a reasonable inference, they mark where the evidence thins out, and they say plainly when a question is outside what they know. Each of these is a small act of accuracy, and taken together they are the strongest available sign that a person is tracking the truth rather than performing. Audiences hear them as hesitancy, evasiveness, or a failure to commit, and rate the speaker as less impressive.

Some of this is presentational and can be improved. There is a difference between vagueness, which conveys nothing, and calibrated hedging, which conveys quite a lot. Saying the answer is somewhere between these two figures, most likely nearer the lower one, and here is what would move it, is a precise statement. Saying it depends is not. Careful speakers who learn to hedge with precision keep the honesty and lose most of the penalty, and it is a fair thing to ask of them.

But the deeper fix is on the listening side. If you treat qualification as weakness, you will systematically select for the speakers least worth listening to, and you will do it without noticing, because the selection feels like a judgement about quality. Train the reverse reflex. When someone volunteers the limits of their own claim, without being pushed, that is not them undermining themselves. It is them handing you the single most useful piece of information in the exchange, and it costs them something to do it.