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Actively open‐minded thinking (AOT) operates in three dimensions: it serves as a norm accounting for how one should search for and use information in judgment and decision making; it is a thinking style that one may adopt in accordance with the norm; and it sets standards for evaluating the thinking of others, particularly the trustworthiness of sources that claim authority. With the first and third dimensions in mind, we explore how AOT influences trust in public health experts, risk perceptions, and compliance with recommended behaviors aimed at slowing the spread and severity of the COVID‐19 pandemic. Using survey data from a nationally representative sample of Americans (N = 857), we tested whether AOT will lead people to place greater trust public health experts (H1). Because these experts have been consistently messaging that COVID‐19 is a real and serious threat to public health, we also hypothesized that trust in experts would be positively associated with high perceived risk (H2), which should have a positive influence on (self‐reported) compliance with CDC recommendations (H3). And because AOT is a self‐directed thinking style, we also expected it to directly influence risk perceptions and, by extension, compliance (H4). Our results support all four hypotheses. We discuss the implications of these results for how risk communication and risk management efforts are designed and practiced.

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.

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