What is open-minded thinking?
Open-minded thinking is the active willingness to consider alternatives, search for evidence against a favored view, and revise confidence when the evidence changes.
Assess whether you actively seek disconfirming evidence, distinguish confidence from identity, and update beliefs proportionately.
Answer as you are today
Choose the answer that best describes your recent behaviour at work. No email required.
What does open-minded thinking mean?
Open-minded thinking is the active willingness to consider alternatives, search for evidence against a favored view, and revise confidence when the evidence changes.
Why it matters at work
Leadership decisions are vulnerable to overconfidence, motivated reasoning, and status effects. Openness does not mean treating every claim as equally credible; it means using fair standards of evidence across preferred and competing views.
What this assessment measures
Alternative views
Eliciting plausible competing explanations and perspectives, especially from people with less power.
Disconfirming evidence
Testing preferred beliefs with the same standards used for other claims.
Belief updating
Adjusting confidence proportionately without treating changed judgment as weakness.
How to interpret your score
Your overall result is normalised to a 0–100 scale. Use it to choose a practice area, not to compare your worth with somebody else.
Build your open-minded thinking foundation
Your answers point to a few situations where one deliberate practice could make this capability more dependable.
A developing open-minded thinking pattern
You show this capability in some conditions. Start with the dimension that becomes least reliable under pressure.
A strong open-minded thinking pattern
Your answers suggest a reliable pattern. Keep testing it with harder situations and feedback from people affected.
Designed for reflection, not diagnosis
The ten behaviour-based statements cover 3 practical dimensions. Responses run from “Never” to “Almost always”; negatively worded items are reverse-scored. Overall and dimension results are converted to a 0–100 scale. The assessment is educational and has not been psychometrically validated.
Read the full assessment methodology and editorial standards.
Research that informed this page
Uriel Haran, Ilana Ritov, and Barbara A. Mellers (2013), “The Role of Actively Open-Minded Thinking in Information Acquisition, Accuracy, and Calibration”, Judgment and Decision Making.