Is There a Scientific Method Which Tests People’s Openness?

This is an amazingly intuitive question and could easily take a whole book to explore [something I actually did a few years back when I wrote, “The Science of Discovery (why do scientists so rarely make breakthroughs)”, 2016]. Shameless plugs from self-promoting authors aside (please forgive me), the gist of my answer is this. The human mind already has the best test built in. The test? Present the idea to the person while watching for “curiosity” and “certainty.”

The old scientific method, and modern measures of the mind based on it, employ certainty in all of their tests. Certainty is used as the test for truth. Certainty is the goal of their test designs. This certainty guarantees test outcomes will never translate well to individual real world cases. Fudge-an-answer based maths like statistics simply cannot accurately measure non linear qualities (such as aspects of human nature, like “openness”).

Worse yet, this scientific method (and any test based on it) requires a hypothesis as the entry way into any and all explorations. Hypotheses are rooted in reasonable certainty. This means, by their very nature, hypotheses limit and narrow a scientist’s scope of exploration. In doing so, they close minds right from the start, because they bias where scientists look for evidence, while at the same time provoking in the hypothesis’ creator the inevitable human desire to be right.

Want to see this test in action? Simply ask yourself this. What did you feel after reading the previous two paragraphs?

Certain I am crazy or wrong, accompanied by a strong, negative emotional reaction?

Per Herbert Spencer, your mind is closed tighter than a crab’s butt hole in a hurricane. Think “contempt prior to investigation.”

OTOH, did you feel curious as to what alternative methods might look like?

If so, then your mind is as open as a three year old’s on a field trip to a petting zoo.

Think, “The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day.”
— Albert Einstein, Life magazine, May 2, 1955

This quote from Einstein was published less than a month after his death. No coincidence, he was still curious even at the end of his life.

My point?

Real scientists feel curiosity even when they know ideas are flawed. Think Einstein, and Bohr, and the EPR Paradox.

Einstein and Bohr were powerful rivals for most of their lives. Bohr continuously argued against Einstein’s common sense view of physics, and the world, in large part, sided with Bohr. Yet on Bohr’s last day alive, he was still trying to understand the EPR Paradox, this despite decades of having argued that Einstein was wrong.

I so admire both men, especially for their open mindedness. Ah, were there only an accessible way to teach this quality in school. The truth is, ones chances for discovery die a quick death in a fish tank filled with certainty, whereas curiosity fills the mind with infinite wonder and possibilities.

So in the sense of the OP’s question, can my tipping-point based pair of opposites (curiosity and certainty) be used as the basis of a scientific test? To see, consider the following example.

The answer posited before mine is based on the Five Factor Model of personality. I dislike this model as it fails to honor the diversity inherent in the human mind. At the same time, I feel curious about answers based on the Five Factor Model, even though as I said, that model aspires to reduce the irreducible non linearity (fractal patterns) inherent in human nature to some simplistic set of rational dictionary terms.

Something about treating people like mindless mechanical dolls just irks me.

Flaws aside, I love that that model sees “open mindedness” as an important component of the mind. And I can’t help but wonder (I feel curious as to) how their discoveries would blossom were they to make observations of curiosity/certainty the basis of their testing for this. Sadly, despite the kindness shown to me by several of the founding theorists of that school, their advice to me was to stop trying to get people to explore any theories outside of what is already accepted.

In spite of this advice, in 2011, I published a personality theory based entirely on fractal patterns.

Curiosity and certainty as a test for open minedness are a part of this theory. No coincidence, curiosity and certainty are also mutually exclusive fractals. This mutual exclusivity is what makes this test for open mindedness scientifically sound. Results require no fudge factor, and the test is easily administered and observed.

Either a person is curious, or they are certain.

Thanks to the OP for such a thought provoking question.

P.S. The name of the theory which this comes from is called, “Constellated Science.”