Open-mindedness involves being receptive to a large kind of ideas, arguments, and knowledge. Being open-mindedness is usually considered a positive quality. it’s a necessary ability so as to think critically and rationally. This doesn’t mean that being open-mindedness is necessarily easy. Being hospitable to new ideas and experiences can sometimes result in confusion and cognitive dissonance once we learn new things that conflict with existing beliefs. However, having the ability to vary and revise outdated or incorrect beliefs is a vital a part of learning and private growth. To enjoy the advantages of being open-minded, work on building this ability.
Characteristics of Open-Minded People-
- They are curious to listen to what others think.
- They are able to have their ideas challenged.
- They don’t get angry after they are wrong.
- They have empathy for others.
- They give some thought to what others are thinking.
Being more open-minded means enjoying some useful and powerful benefits. Open-mindedness helps you:
- Gain insight. Challenging your existing beliefs and considering new ideas can provide you with fresh insights about the issues and also teach you new things about yourself.
- Have new experiences. Being hospitable with other ideas may also open you up to new experiences.
- Achieve personal growth. Keeping an open mind can facilitate your growth as someone. You learn new things about the planet and therefore the people around you.
- Become mentally strong. Staying receptive to new ideas and experiences can facilitate you to become a stronger, more vibrant person. Your experiences and knowledge still repose on each other.
- Learn new things. It’s hard to stay learning after you surround yourself with identical old ideas. Pushing your boundaries and reaching resolute people with different perspectives and experiences can help keep your mind fresh.
How to Be More Open-Minded
Learning to be more open-minded is feasible. In some ways, our minds are designed to look at concepts as wholes. We develop a plan or a category of data, which the psychologist Piaget remarked as a schema. As we encounter new information, we tend to require to sort it into our existing schemas in a cognition referred to as assimilation.
1. Fight the Confirmation Bias
confirmation bias is often one of the largest contributors to closed-mindedness. Overcoming this tendency, however, are often tricky. The confirmation bias involves paying more attention to things that confirm our existing beliefs, while at the identical time discounting evidence that challenges what we predict.
Learning the way to evaluate sources of knowledge and learning the way to be an informed consumer of scientific stories within the news may be helpful.
2. Ask Questions
Most people wish to believe their own sense of intellectual virtue. And in some ways, it’s important to be able to have trust and faith in your own choices. But it’s good to recollect that what might sound like being resolute and committed to certain ideals may very well be a sort of closed-minded stubbornness.
Part of being open-minded involves having the ability to question not just others, but also yourself. As you encounter new information, ask yourself some key questions:
- How much does one really understand the topic?
- How trustworthy is that the source?
- Have you considered other ideas?
- Do you have any biases which may be influencing your thinking?.
3. Give It Time
When you hear something you don’t like, your first instinct could also be to disagree or simply stop working. rather than listening or considering the opposite perspective, you enter a mode of thinking where you’re just trying to prove the opposite person wrong, sometimes before you even have an opportunity to think about all of the points.
The alternative is to provide yourself a quick period to contemplate the arguments and evaluate the evidence. After you hear something, take some moments to think about the subsequent points before you respond:
- Are your own arguments based upon multiple sources?
- Are you willing to revise your opinion in the face of conflicting evidence?
- Will you hold on to your opinion on whether or not the evidence discounts it?
Open-mindedness requires more cognitive effort than dogmatism. Just being willing to think about other perspectives may be a challenge, but it may be even tougher after you end up having to revise your own beliefs as a result.
4. Practice Intellectual Humility
Even if you’re an expert on a subject, attempt to confine the mind that the brain is far more imperfect and imprecise than most people want to admit.
When people think that they’re an authority on a subject or believe that they already know all there’s to understand, they’re less willing to require new information and entertain new ideas. This not only limits your learning potential, but it may be an example of a cognitive bias referred to as the Dunning-Kruger effect. This bias leads people to overestimate their own knowledge of a subject, making them blind to their own ignorance.
True experts tend to truly be more humble about their knowledge; they know that there’s always more to find out. So if you think that you recognize it all, the likelihood is that you just probably don’t.
-by Shinjini Chatterjee
