Across decades of research into how people think, one behavioral pattern keeps emerging in the data as a reliable marker of high cognitive ability, and that habit has nothing 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 single strongest thinking disposition associated with higher intelligence was what they called actively open-minded thinking: the habitual tendency to seek out evidence that challenges one’s existing beliefs, to sit with uncertainty and to revise one’s conclusions when the data demands it.
Over the last three decades, that finding has been replicated so consistently across different populations and methodologies that a 2023 comprehensive review in the Journal of Intelligence, one of the field’s most authoritative journals, confirmed it still stands as one of the most robust links between a cognitive disposition and measured intellectual ability.
Many people describe themselves as intellectually uncertain: slow to commit to opinions, prone to second-guessing, uncomfortable with the speed at which others seem to reach conclusions. But over time, these same people tend to perform significantly better on cognitive measures than those with fully formed views. Here’s why.
How This Habit Compounds Your Intelligence
Actively open-minded thinking reflects the extent to which someone habitually weighs new evidence against a favored belief, considers others’ views before closing on a position and remains genuinely open to being wrong. It sounds straightforward. In practice, it cuts against almost every social instinct we have.
What makes the actively open-minded thinking-intelligence link particularly striking isn’t simply that the two correlate. It’s the direction of the relationship across multiple studies: actively open-minded thinking consistently predicts better real-world reasoning performance on heuristics and biased tasks, on calibration measures, on tests of scientific reasoning — even when controlling for raw cognitive ability.
In other words, this isn’t just intelligence expressing itself through behavior. It’s a thinking habit that compounds whatever cognitive ability a person already has. That distinction matters because it means actively open-minded thinking can be intentionally observed and built.
How This Habit Is Connected To Intelligence
To understand why actively open-minded thinking clusters so reliably with high cognitive ability, it helps to look at the broader personality science.
A 2023 meta-analysis published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, drawing on decades of research across hundreds of studies, found that within the openness-to-experience domain, intellectual curiosity showed the strongest and most consistent positive correlations with measured intelligence — stronger than any other personality facet examined.
Not openness to aesthetics, not sensation-seeking, not openness to feelings. The facets that pointed most reliably toward high cognitive ability were the ones oriented toward ideas and toward an honest reckoning with one’s own thinking. Actively open-minded thinking is what that profile looks like as a daily behavior. It’s openness to experience translated into practice.
The motivational engine underneath it has its own name in the literature: need for cognition. This refers to the tendency to find effortful, challenging thinking intrinsically rewarding rather than draining. For people high in need for cognition, encountering a persuasive counterargument doesn’t trigger defensiveness. It triggers engagement.
A 2024 longitudinal study published in the Journal of Intelligence, which tracked 341 adolescents across a school year using latent change score models, found a bidirectional relationship: fluid intelligence predicted growth in need for cognition, and need for cognition predicted growth in fluid intelligence. The relationship runs in both directions.
This is why psychologists often find that people who describe themselves as indecisive — who change their minds often, who find it difficult to state positions with complete confidence — are frequently the sharpest thinkers in the room. Their uncertainty is a signal that their cognitive system is working correctly, continuously integrating new information rather than defending a position already staked out.
What This Habit Looks Like In Practice
Actively open-minded thinking manifests in specific, recognizable behaviors, and they don’t always look like intelligence from the outside.
Before sharing a view, people high in actively open-minded thinking tend to ask themselves, implicitly or explicitly, “What would actually change my mind about this?” If they can’t answer that question, they hold the opinion more loosely. They treat public belief revision not as an embarrassment but as a mark of intellectual integrity, a signal that they are responsive to evidence rather than anchored to an identity.
On top of this, they also deliberately seek out asymmetric conversations: people with different professional backgrounds, different priors, different life experiences — not to debate, but to locate the edges of their own blind spots.
From the outside, these behaviors can look like indecision or a lack of conviction, but research 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 concerned with respecting opposing views and remaining open to revising one’s attitudes when faced with new evidence.
Crucially, the researchers found a compensatory effect: either high intelligence or high cognitive flexibility was sufficient to support intellectual humility; neither was strictly necessary alone. Two roads in, but both are reliably traveled by highly capable thinkers.
How You Can Cultivate A Habit Of Open-Minded Thinking
The most important implication of this body of research is also its most hopeful one: actively open-minded thinking is not a fixed trait.
The longitudinal evidence on need for cognition is clear: the environments people move through — homes that reward questioning over compliance, workplaces that treat intellectual doubt as a virtue rather than a liability, educational settings that engage people as active participants in knowledge-building rather than passive recipients of it — meaningfully shift people toward higher cognitive engagement over time.
This means actively open-minded thinking is, at least in part, a practice. It is built through repeated, deliberate exposure to disconfirming information. It is strengthened every time someone asks, “What am I missing?” rather than “How do I defend this?” And it weakens in environments that reward certainty over accuracy.
The takeaway for anyone who works alongside, leads or wants to develop highly capable people is this: the visible signals of strong thinking are often the opposite of what we’ve been trained to look for. Confidence reads as competence. Fluency reads as expertise. But the deeper marker that research points to most consistently, across decades and methodologies, is a genuine, practiced willingness to be wrong.
If you want to know what your habits say about your intelligence, you can take the science-inspired Cognitive Thinking Style Test and know your results today.
