The No. 1 Habit All Highly Intelligent People Have, By A Psychologist

InnovationScienceThe No. 1 Habit All Highly Intelligent People Have, By A PsychologistByMark Travers,Contributor.Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I write about relationships, personality, and everyday psychology.Follow AuthorJun 03, 2026, 08:30am EDT--:-- / --:--This voice experience is generated by AI. Learn more.This voice experience is generated by AI. Learn more.The primary habit that signals high intelligence is, surprisingly, not about knowing how to be right. It’s about knowing how to be wrong.gettyAcross decades of research into how people think, one behavioral pattern keeps emerging in the data as a reliable marker of high cognitive ability, and that habit has nothing to do with how quickly someone reaches a conclusion. In a landmark 1997 study published in the Journal of Educational Psychology, psychologists Keith Stanovich and Richard West found that the single strongest thinking disposition associated with higher intelligence was what they called actively open-minded thinking: the habitual tendency to seek out evidence that challenges one’s existing beliefs, to sit with uncertainty and to revise one’s conclusions when the data demands it. Over the last three decades, that finding has been replicated so consistently across different populations and methodologies that a 2023 comprehensive review in the Journal of Intelligence, one of the field’s most authoritative journals, confirmed it still stands as one of the most robust links between a cognitive disposition and measured intellectual ability.Many people describe themselves as intellectually uncertain: slow to commit to opinions, prone to second-guessing, uncomfortable with the speed at which others seem to reach conclusions. But over time, these same people tend to perform significantly better on cognitive measures than those with fully formed views. Here’s why.How This Habit Compounds Your IntelligenceActively open-minded thinking reflects the extent to which someo...