I think, therefore I act, Revisited: Building a stronger foundation for risk analysis

Abstract

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.