Actively open-minded thinking (AOT) is a thinking style in which people engaged in judgment and decision-making actively seek out and then evaluate information in a manner that is intentionally disconnected from their prior beliefs and motivations and in line with self-perceptions of autonomy. Actively open-minded thinkers have been observed to make both more accurate judgments about the magnitude of risks and more evidence-based decisions under uncertainty in a wide range of situations such as climate change and politics. In addition, actively open-minded thinkers functioning in domains where they lack a desired level of knowledge are open to "outsourcing" the job of critical reasoning thinking to credible experts; in other words, they are better able to gauge who is trustworthy and then rely on the insights of these trustworthy others to help them reach a conclusion. We report results from a follow-up to research previously published in Risk Analysis that confirms these tenets in the context of COVID-19. We then extend these results to offer a series of recommendations for strengthening the process and outcomes of risk analysis: leveraging the latent norm of autonomy and personal agency that underpins AOT, activating or engaging with approaches to reasoning-such as decision structuring-that are in line with AOT, and working upstream and downstream of risk analysis to establish AOT as a norm of its own.
Keywords: actively open-minded thinking; decision-making; risk management; risk perception; trust.
© 2023 The Authors. Risk Analysis published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Society for Risk Analysis.