What is open-mindedness?

What does open-mindedness mean?

In ordinary use, open-minded means ready to hear something new without deciding in advance that it is wrong. The personality sense sharpens that into something testable: what a person does when evidence arrives that cuts against what they believe. The plain definition is this: how willing you are to consider other views and change your mind when the facts change. Compressed further, it is the willingness to hold a view loosely enough that evidence can still change it.

The term in psychology is actively open-minded thinking, and the word active is doing work. This is not passive receptivity. It is the effort of looking for the reasons you might be wrong, weighing them rather than filing them, and holding off until the case is made. It also covers willingness to consider unfamiliar values: ways of living and judging that are not the ones you were raised inside.

It is not having no opinions. A person high on this facet can hold firm, well-argued positions; what marks them out is that they can tell you what would change their mind. Nor is it agreeableness in disguise. Going along with someone to keep the peace is a social move, and it can happen with a mind that has not opened at all.

Which personality dimension is open-mindedness part of?

Open-mindedness is a facet of Openness to Experience, the dimension that gathers curiosity, imagination, aesthetic interest and receptivity to the unfamiliar. The dimension has been named Openness, Intellect and Culture over the years, and some modern inventories call the whole dimension Open-Mindedness, which is one reason this facet name causes confusion.

In the NEO inventories the closest facet is Values, which covers readiness to re-examine social, political and religious values (Costa & McCrae, 1992). The BFI-2 renames the whole domain Open-Mindedness and reports it in three facets, Aesthetic Sensitivity, Intellectual Curiosity and Creative Imagination (Soto & John, 2017). Between domain and facet sit two broader aspects, Openness and Intellect (DeYoung et al., 2007), and the public-domain IPIP pools offer open-licence items as an alternative to commercial inventories (Goldberg et al., 2006; Johnson, 2014). In the character strengths tradition the same ground appears as Judgment, also called open-mindedness, one of the 24 strengths under the virtue of wisdom (Peterson & Seligman, 2004).

Wellington scores it from items in the style of the Actively Open-Minded Thinking scale together with the VIA Judgment and Open-Mindedness strength. It is one of 13 traits reported beneath Openness to Experience; the hierarchy is in the Big Five facets, explained.

How is open-mindedness different from tolerance?

Open-mindedness and tolerance are the pair most often run together, and the difference is what is being accepted. Open-mindedness is about ideas and your own position on them: you are willing to revise what you think. Tolerance is about people: you can let someone live, believe and judge differently from you without needing to fix them or get away from them.

They come apart in both directions. A person can be highly tolerant and firmly closed: comfortable with a neighbour whose politics are the opposite of theirs, and unwilling to reconsider their own. A person can also be highly open-minded and impatient with people: happy to follow an argument anywhere, and quick to dismiss anyone who cannot argue it well. The other neighbour is intellect, the enjoyment of abstract ideas for their own sake. Intellect is appetite for thinking; open-mindedness is what happens to a conclusion once you have reached it.

What does high open-mindedness look like?

High scorers treat their own beliefs as working drafts, and they are not embarrassed to publish a correction.

• You ask what evidence would change your mind, and you have an answer.
• You change your view in public and do not find it humiliating.
• Unfamiliar values interest you before they alarm you.

The costs are real. A mind held that loosely can be slow to act, because there is always one more consideration and the case is never quite closed. Openness to every argument also makes you reachable by a well-constructed bad one, so this facet works best alongside the habit of checking where a claim came from. And a person with no fixed points is hard to rely on, not because they are dishonest but because their position last month was genuinely different.

What does low open-mindedness look like?

Low scorers are not stupid and they are not bigots. They hold their positions firmly, having usually arrived at them for reasons, and they do not reopen them casually.

• You commit, and people know where they stand with you.
• You can say precisely why the view you hold has survived this long.
• In a crisis you decide, while others are still weighing.

The costs run the other way. A position defended past its evidence becomes a liability, and the defence is usually invisible from inside. Strong prior beliefs shape what a person notices, so the contrary case often does not get a hearing rather than being rejected after one. And a reputation for not moving means people stop bringing you what you would need to hear. Self-knowledge has limits for everyone, and introspection is not a direct route to what drives us; watching your own behaviour and seeing yourself through other people's eyes are the alternatives (Wilson & Dunn, 2004).

What does the research say about open-mindedness?

This facet sits across two traditions, personality and thinking styles, and the strongest evidence concerns the parent dimension and the character strength.

• As a character strength. Judgment, also named open-mindedness, is one of the 24 strengths in the VIA classification, under the virtue of wisdom (Peterson & Seligman, 2004), and across 1,063,921 online respondents in 75 nations the rank order in which the 24 strengths were endorsed was substantially similar, with judgment among the most endorsed (McGrath, 2015).
• Structure that holds up. The five-factor structure, Openness included, reproduced in observer ratings from fifty cultures (McCrae & Terracciano, 2005), and self-report profiles from fifty-six nations show the same dimensions (Schmitt et al., 2007).
• Why facets are reported at all. Narrower traits add prediction that a broad score misses (Soto & John, 2017).
• A thinking style as much as a temperament. Part of this facet is a habit of reasoning rather than a temperament, which is one reason it is often treated as practisable. What the evidence supports is general rather than specific to this facet: across 207 intervention studies trait measures moved about a third of a standard deviation over roughly six months, largest for Emotional Stability (Roberts et al., 2017).
• Age. Across 92 longitudinal samples Openness rose in adolescence and fell again in old age, while Conscientiousness and Emotional Stability rose mostly between twenty and forty (Roberts et al., 2006). In a cross-sectional sample of 132,515 adults aged twenty-one to sixty, Conscientiousness and Agreeableness were still rising through early and middle adulthood (Srivastava et al., 2003).

One caution: almost everyone rates themselves as more open-minded than average, which is exactly what a self-report cannot check. Other people are the better judges of highly evaluative traits, while the self is the better judge of inner ones such as anxiety, so reading this score alongside what others report is more informative than reading it alone (Vazire, 2010).

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, across six dimensions: Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability, Openness to Experience, Honesty-Humility, and reports Openness to Experience as a whole rather than its facets. The first ten questions are answered before anything is asked of you; after question ten you sign in with an email address so answers are saved and results can be shown. There is no card.

Open-mindedness itself is measured by 6 statements on the same scale, and it is reported in the Wellington Membership, $4.99 a month, which adds the Portrait, 336 questions in 4 chapters, to reach 90 traits including every Big Five facet and all 24 VIA character strengths, then a weekly module over 104 weeks toward all 255 traits.

Your score is the average of those statements, set against a reference sample as a percentile and reported in one of three bands: Quiet below the 30th percentile, Balanced to the 70th, High above. Those norms are provisional until the norming sample is complete. The bands and the Portrait names exist to make the result easier to talk about; the percentile is the measurement, and it is always shown alongside. Each band has its own page, written in advance by the writing and psychology team: 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), High is The Open Window (You would rather be corrected than be certain and wrong). The methodology walks through a worked example and the scoring in full.

Wellington is a wellness tool for reflection, not a medical or psychological diagnosis, and it does not replace care from a qualified professional. It is not built for hiring or selection, and you can export or delete your data at any time.

Questions people ask

Can open-mindedness change?

Yes, more readily than most traits, because part of it is a habit of reasoning. A systematic review found real trait change through intervention, 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). Among people who wanted to change a trait, measured change followed over sixteen weeks, and those who set specific if-then plans changed more than those given general intentions (Hudson & Fraley, 2015).

Is open-mindedness the same as having no firm beliefs?

No. High scorers often hold strong positions and argue them hard. What distinguishes them is that they can name the evidence that would move them, and they act on it when it turns up. Having no position at all is a different thing, and it is not what the questions measure. The useful version is firm views held with an open hand.

How is open-mindedness different from tolerance?

Open-mindedness is about ideas: your willingness to revise what you think when the case against it is good. Tolerance is about people: your capacity to let others believe and live differently without hostility. They come apart in both directions. Someone can be entirely comfortable with a neighbour whose views are opposite to theirs and completely unwilling to reconsider their own.

Can a self-report really measure open-mindedness?

Partly, and with a known limit. Almost everyone rates themselves as more open-minded than average, and a questionnaire cannot audit that. What it can do is catch consistent differences in how people say they handle disagreement, which do relate to behaviour. In a round-robin study, other people judged highly evaluative traits more accurately than the self did, so reading the score next to what people who know you report is more informative than reading it alone (Vazire, 2010).