This symposium advances a person-centered understanding of good thinking, moving beyond purely cognitive assessments to explore the personality traits, daily behaviors, and narrative identities that characterize good thinking. We bring together diverse methodological approaches, including expert consensus methods, experience sampling, narrative analysis, and forecasting tournaments, to illuminate what it means to be a good thinker. The first presentation by Jayawickreme establishes a trait profile of the good thinker, contrasting expert and lay perspectives on core traits such as open-mindedness, rationality, and intellectual humility. Subsequent talks explore the functional outcomes and manifestations of these traits. Mansfield examines how perspective-taking predicts adaptive functioning in emerging adulthood while Fleeson investigates the daily life of the good thinker, asking whether intellectual virtues enhance or strain social relationships and well-being. Blackie analyzes how the "good thinker" profile correlates with specific themes in narrative identity. Finally, Grossmann demonstrates the real-world utility of these traits, specifically showing how intellectual humility, synergistic with fluid intelligence, improves accuracy in long-term forecasts of global welfare. Together, these presentations provide an integrative look at the traits and virtues of good thinking, from clarifying their importance to their impact on the self, society, and the ability to predict the future.
Experts and pundits routinely forecast societal trends, yet these predictions often fall short—sometimes dramatically—leading to poor policy decisions and the erosion of public trust. What characteristics distinguish accurate forecasters from inaccurate ones? We tested whether intellectual humility (IH)—recognizing limits of knowledge and fallibility—predicts forecasting accuracy beyond general cognitive abilities and social-personality dispositions in a three-year-long incentivized tournament (N=520 US adults). Participants forecasted four indicators of societal welfare—CO2 concentrations, infant mortality, poverty rates, and non-state armed conflict—receiving identical historical data, real accuracy feedback, and peer predictions varying in diversity. IH independently predicted greater likelihood of updating one’s predictions, and higher forecasting accuracy beyond fluid intelligence, knowledge, education, attitudes, ideology, and personality. Moreover, participants with higher trait-level IH and fluid intelligence became more accurate over time, and those who increased in IH across waves also showed gains in accuracy. Conversely, exposure to diverse peer predictions, general knowledge, and cognitive reflection did not predict accuracy. Crucially, IH’s advantage strengthened after feedback and in volatile domains. Topic modeling of forecasting rationales converged on the same pattern: accurate predictions referenced base-rate data, uncertainty, and evidence-based recalibration of one’s predictions, whereas less accurate ones expressed generalized pessimism about world affairs.
Researchers have found individuals high in generativity and self-transcendence construct unique narrative identities from their lived experiences (McAdams, 2013; Reischer et al., 2021). This pre-registered study investigates relationships between the big three dimensions of narrative identity (McLean et al., 2020) and the personality profile of the good thinker (Ratchford et al., 2024). Eighty-three participants recruited from the UK (42 women, Mage = 43.95, SD = 17.07) completed a 2-hour Life Story Interview and 21-item Intellectual Character Index. Life scenes are currently being coded for themes from autobiographical reasoning, structure, and motivational and affective dimensions. The good thinker personality profile was calculated with cosine similarity scores that quantify how closely the participants’ profiles align with a prototypical good thinker profile generated through consultation with both expert and lay-person samples. This presentation will report on results of these relationships between narrative identity themes and the good thinker personality profile while controlling for individual differences in social desirability.
Perspective taking, the tendency to adopt the psychological point of view of others in everyday life, is a core component of empathy (Davis, 1983). Its development has been widely studied in the first two decades of life (e.g., Hall et al., 2021) but less so in the third, wherein expanding social responsibilities may make it especially important. Two studies address this gap. Study 1 (N = 117), cross-sectional, examines correlations between self-reported perspective-taking, social functioning, future aspirations, and how young people transitioning to emerging adulthood narrate their greatest life challenges. Narratives are being reliably coded for features such as complexity (Mansfield et al., 2010), communion themes (McAdams, 2021), and insightful meaning-making (McLean & Pratt, 2006). Study 2, a 3-wave, 1-year longitudinal design (wave 3, N = 64), replicates and extends study 1 by also testing the extent to which perspective-taking changes over time in early emerging adulthood and implications of change for self and social functioning.
What traits characterize a good thinker? Prior research has examined cognitive abilities, decision-making processes, and epistemic traits, yet an integrative person-based model of good thinking remains underdeveloped. In this paper, we generate an expert-consensus model of the good thinker by identifying key intellectual traits that shape effective thinking. Across five studies (N = 918)—including qualitative responses, quantitative ratings, Q-sort rankings, and advanced generative AI analyses—we examine perspectives from experts (philosophers, psychologists, and natural scientists; N = 324) and lay participants (undergraduate students and the general public; N = 594). Open-mindedness and rationality emerge as the most important traits across all groups. However, experts emphasize intellectual humility and carefulness, while lay participants prioritize intellectual autonomy and adaptability. AI analyses of open-ended responses confirmed broad convergence between expert and lay perspectives, though lay participants tend to underreport intellectual humility. These findings advance a person-centered model of good thinking.
The purpose of this talk is to describe the daily lives of people who think well, in terms of the impact of thinking well on personal mood and on their relationships with others. Good thinking is presumptively a virtue oriented internally, that is, towards the thinkers themselves benefitting from the better thoughts. However, good thinking might be at least secondarily a social virtue, directed externally at better relationships, via improving dialogue, buy-in, and coordination. Conversely, aspects of good thinking may in fact be socially aversive, because it may demand a higher level of cognitive effort and competitiveness from others than the others desire. Two experience-sampling studies investigated state good thinking for 1-3 weeks, affect experiences, and subject interpretation of interaction partners’ affects and behaviors. Subjects’ degree of good thinking is assessed as the degree to which they match the good thinker profile, via cosine similarity. Multilevel models will investigate the within-person associations between good thinking and subject affect, between good thinking and perceived partner affect, and between good thinking and perceived partner supportiveness and engagement. Cross-level interactions will indicate whether trait good thinking moderates these relationships.