After decades of research into how people think, one behavioral pattern continues to emerge in the data as a reliable marker of high cognitive ability. And that habit has little to do with how quickly someone reaches a conclusion.
In a landmark 1997 study published in the Journal of Educational Psychology, psychologists Keith Stanovich and Richard West found that the strongest thinking disposition associated with higher intelligence was what they called actively open-minded thinking.
It describes a habitual tendency to seek out evidence that challenges existing beliefs, sit with uncertainty, and revise conclusions when the evidence demands it.
Over the past three decades, this finding has been replicated so consistently across different populations and methodologies that a comprehensive 2023 review published in the Journal of Intelligence, one of the field’s leading journals, confirmed that it remains one of the strongest links between a cognitive disposition and measured intellectual ability.
How This Habit Can Add to Intelligence
Actively open-minded thinking reflects how consistently someone weighs new evidence against a favored belief, considers other people’s opinions before settling on a position, and remains genuinely willing to be wrong.
It sounds simple. In practice, it runs counter to many of our strongest social instincts.
What makes the relationship between actively open-minded thinking and intelligence particularly striking is not simply that the two are correlated. It is the direction of the relationship found across multiple studies.
Actively open-minded thinking consistently predicts better real-world reasoning performance in heuristics and bias tasks, measures of calibration, and tests of scientific reasoning—even when raw cognitive ability is controlled for.
In other words, this is not simply intelligence expressed through behavior. It is a thinking habit that adds to whatever cognitive ability a person already possesses.
That distinction matters because it means actively open-minded thinking can be observed and intentionally developed.
Why Open-Minded Thinking Is Connected to Intelligence
To understand why actively open-minded thinking is so consistently associated with higher cognitive ability, it helps to look at the broader science of personality.
A 2024 meta-analysis published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, drawing on decades of research across hundreds of studies, found that within the broader domain of openness to experience, intellectual curiosity showed the strongest and most consistent positive correlations with measured intelligence.
The relationship was stronger than that of any other personality facet examined.
It was not openness to aesthetics, sensation seeking, or openness to feelings.
The facets that most reliably pointed toward higher cognitive ability were those oriented toward ideas and toward an honest reckoning with our own thinking.
Actively open-minded thinking is what that profile looks like in everyday behavior. It is openness to experience translated into practice.
The Motivational Force Behind It: The Need for Cognition
The motivational engine underneath this behavior has its own name in the scientific literature: need for cognition.
It refers to a tendency to find difficult and effortful thinking intrinsically rewarding rather than exhausting.
For people with a high need for cognition, discovering a persuasive counterargument does not necessarily trigger defensiveness. Instead, it triggers engagement.
A 2024 longitudinal study published in the Journal of Intelligence followed 341 adolescents over the course of a school year using latent change score models.
The researchers found a bidirectional relationship: fluid intelligence predicted growth in the need for cognition, while the need for cognition predicted growth in fluid intelligence.
The relationship, in other words, runs in both directions.
This may help explain why psychologists often find that people who describe themselves as indecisive, who change their minds frequently, or who struggle to express their positions with complete confidence can actually be some of the sharpest thinkers in the room.
Their uncertainty may be a sign that their cognitive system is working properly—continuously integrating new information rather than defending a position that has already been established.
What Actively Open-Minded Thinking Looks Like in Practice
Actively open-minded thinking manifests itself through specific, recognizable behaviors, and it does not always look like intelligence from the outside.
People who practice it deliberately seek out asymmetrical conversations: conversations with people from different professional backgrounds, different life experiences, and different perspectives.
They do not necessarily seek these conversations to debate.
Instead, they use them to identify the boundaries of their own blind spots.
From the outside, these behaviors can look like indecision or a lack of conviction. Research, however, suggests otherwise.
A 2019 study published in Personality and Individual Differences found that both intelligence and cognitive flexibility independently predicted intellectual humility, particularly the facets associated with respecting opposing viewpoints and remaining open to revising one’s attitudes in response to new evidence.
Importantly, the researchers also found a compensatory effect: either high intelligence or high cognitive flexibility was sufficient to support intellectual humility. Neither was strictly necessary on its own.
There are two paths, but highly capable thinkers can confidently travel either one.
How to Cultivate a More Open-Minded Thinking Habit
Perhaps the most important implication of this body of research is also the most encouraging: actively open-minded thinking is not a completely fixed trait.
This means that, at least in part, it is a practice.
It is built through repeated and deliberate exposure to information that contradicts what we already believe.
It becomes stronger every time someone asks:
“What am I missing?”
Instead of:
“How can I defend this?”
And it becomes weaker in environments that reward certainty over accuracy.
The difference may seem subtle, but it can fundamentally change the way we respond to new information.
One person may constantly try to prove that they were right.
Another may be more interested in finding out whether they actually were.
The Deeper Sign of a Capable Mind
The takeaway for anyone who works alongside, leads, or wants to develop highly capable people is this: the visible signs of strong thinking are often the opposite of what we have been trained to look for.
Confidence is often interpreted as competence.
Fluency is often interpreted as expertise.
A quick answer can look like a sign of intelligence.
But the deeper marker that research has pointed to most consistently, across decades and methodologies, is a genuine and practiced willingness to be wrong.
That does not mean doubting everything or abandoning your convictions.
It means being willing to examine them, actively search for evidence that could contradict them, and change them when the evidence demands it.
In that sense, one of the most powerful characteristics of an intelligent mind may not be its ability to always have the right answer.
It may be its willingness to recognize when it no longer does.
