Actively open-minded thinking, and why we measure it

The construct comes from Baron's work on good thinking, with scale development by Stanovich and West and a short form validated by Haran, Ritov and Mellers in 2013. It is not a measure of intelligence and not a measure of open-mindedness in the social sense. It is specifically about how you treat evidence that cuts against you.

Why it earns its place in a four-minute onboarding

• It predicts real behaviour, not just self-description: belief updating and forecasting accuracy in tournament conditions.
• It is short. A handful of items, which matters enormously when the budget for the whole onboarding is a few minutes.
• It has been validated beyond English, including adaptations reported in the judgement and decision-making literature.
• It is directly actionable. It tells you how hard to push someone before they stop listening, which is a product setting, not a personality note.

Someone who goes looking for the counter-argument needs a different board from someone who does not.

How it changes a board

Score low and the board leans towards falsification and precedent: the counter-argument has to arrive from outside, because it will not be generated from inside. Score high and the useful additions are different, because you already challenge yourself. What tends to be missing is landing it: execution, constraint, compression into a call someone can act on.

The honest limit

It is still a self-report scale, and self-report has a ceiling. Short forms trade accuracy for completion. We use it because the alternative measures worth having take far longer than anyone will spend before seeing value, and because the profile keeps getting corrected by what you actually do in sessions.

Five Peers editorial note. Sources named in the text.