How to be more open-minded: what the evidence supports

What does it actually mean to become more open-minded?

Open-mindedness is the willingness to consider views other than your own and to revise what you think when the evidence against it is good. It also covers something broader than argument: a willingness to consider values and ways of living that are not the ones you grew up with. That is narrower than Openness to Experience, the broad dimension it sits inside, which also covers imagination, aesthetic interest and appetite for the unfamiliar. You can be drawn to new art and new places, the broader dimension, while still holding your own conclusions tightly, this one facet.

The Big Five structure this facet sits inside came from decades of lexical research, not one study, and has survived repeated attempts to replace it (Goldberg, 1993). The practices below draw on a body of work about how traits change generally.

Which part of Openness are you actually trying to change?

Factor analyses of the facets beneath each Big Five domain find that Openness to Experience splits into two correlated but separable aspects, usually named Openness and Intellect (DeYoung et al., 2007). Intellect is the appetite side, enjoying abstract ideas for their own sake, closer to what Wellington reports as Trait Intellect. Openness, in this narrower sense, is closer to open-mindedness: what happens to a belief once you have one, and how willing you are to let unfamiliar values in.

Reading more mostly exercises Intellect. Changing your mind, or sitting with a way of living that is not yours, exercises open-mindedness specifically. Adventurousness, the facet of trying the new route, is a near neighbour, and so is tolerance, which is about accepting people rather than revising ideas.

Can you tell how open-minded you already are just by thinking about it?

Not reliably. Much of what drives personality, attitudes and self-esteem is not accessible to conscious introspection, and turning inward to check does not give a direct pipeline to it. The more useful routes are watching your own behaviour in the moments that test the trait, and seeing yourself through the eyes of people who know you (Wilson & Dunn, 2004).

Self-report struggles here for a second reason. In a round-robin study, friends judged evaluative traits, the kind where one direction is clearly more desirable, more accurately than the self did, while the self was the better judge of low-observability traits such as neuroticism (Vazire, 2010). Open-mindedness is strongly evaluative, since almost nobody describes themselves as closed, which makes a friend's honest read of how you respond to disagreement a useful check on your own impression.

What actually changes it, if wanting to isn't enough?

Wanting to change is not nothing. Across two 16-week studies, wanting to change a trait was followed by measured change in it, in both self-report and daily behaviour (Hudson & Fraley, 2015). What separated the people who moved furthest was specificity: implementation intentions, specific if-then plans naming a behaviour, a time and a situation, helped people reach the change they wanted, while a simpler intervention did not (Hudson & Fraley, 2015).

Be honest about the size of what is achievable. A systematic review of 207 intervention studies found trait measures moving by about a third of a standard deviation over roughly six months, largest for Emotional Stability, and drawn mostly from therapy and counselling trials (Roberts et al., 2017). See can personality change?

What practices actually build open-mindedness?

Each one follows from the evidence above, that specific, repeatable moves outperform a resolution, and leans on a slightly different facet beneath Openness to Experience.

Each practice creates a specific moment to act in, rather than a general intention to be more open, the same shape as the implementation intentions that worked best in the Hudson and Fraley trials (Hudson & Fraley, 2015).

What are the limits of open-mindedness?

Open-mindedness is not credulity. It means looking for the reasons you might be wrong and weighing them properly, not accepting whatever is presented to you. A mind that revises itself for every claim is not admirably open, it is simply reachable by whoever argued last or loudest.

• A considered no is still open-minded, if you can say what would have changed it.
• Changing your mind because the argument was good is open-minded; changing it to avoid an argument is not.
• Holding a firm view after genuinely weighing the case against it is not the opposite of this facet.

The useful version keeps firm views and an open hand: you can hold a conclusion and still name, honestly, what would move you off it.

How does Wellington measure open-mindedness?

Wellington is a science-based personality assessment from Therabot Labs LLC. It measures personality as continuous traits, built on the Big Five and HEXACO models, and writes the results back as a personal report rather than a type.

The free Snapshot is 60 questions, about 7 minutes, and scores six dimensions: Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability, Openness to Experience, Honesty-Humility. The first ten are answered before anything is asked of you; after question ten you sign in with an email address so your answers are saved and your results can be shown. There is no card. It scores Openness to Experience as a whole, not the facets beneath it.

Open-mindedness itself is scored from 6 statements, and it is one of the 90 traits with the membership, which adds the Portrait, 336 questions in 4 chapters. Every trait is reported as a percentile against the reference sample. The three bands, Quiet below the 30th percentile, Balanced to the 70th, High above, and the Portrait names exist to make the result easier to talk about; the percentile is the measurement, and it is always shown alongside. Those norms are provisional until the norming sample is complete.

For open-mindedness, Quiet is The Firm Ground (You know where you stand, and people can build on it), Balanced is The Fair Hearing (You listen properly, and then you decide), and High is The Open Window (You would rather be corrected than be certain and wrong). Those pages describe a starting point, not a target. See the methodology.

Wellington is a wellness tool for reflection, not a medical or psychological diagnosis, and it does not replace care from a qualified professional.

Questions people ask

How long does it take to become more open-minded?

Weeks to months. A systematic review of intervention studies found trait measures moved by about a third of a standard deviation over roughly six months (Roberts et al., 2017). People who wanted to change showed measurable movement within 16 weeks, and specific if-then plans moved them further than general intentions (Hudson & Fraley, 2015).

Is being open-minded the same as agreeing with everyone?

No. Open-mindedness is about weighing a case properly, not accepting it automatically. A person can consider the strongest version of an argument, decide it does not hold, and say no. That is still open-minded, provided they can say what would have changed their mind.

Can other people tell if I've become more open-minded before I can?

Often, yes. In a round-robin study, friends judged evaluative traits, the kind where one direction is clearly more desirable, more accurately than the person themselves did (Vazire, 2010). Open-mindedness is a strongly evaluative trait, so a friend's honest read of how you respond to disagreement is a useful check on your own impression.

Is open-mindedness the same thing as Openness to Experience?

No. Openness to Experience is the broad dimension covering curiosity, imagination and appetite for the unfamiliar. Open-mindedness is one narrower facet inside it, about revising beliefs and considering unfamiliar values. Someone can be high on the broad dimension while still holding their own conclusions tightly, which is this facet rather than the dimension as a whole.