Yale psychologist Joan Cook says even your most confident beliefs deserve a second look.
At a Glance
- Yale trauma psychologist Joan M. Cook published a TIME op-ed on November 7, 2026, urging readers to question their own beliefs.
- Cook tells readers to act like detectives and test whether their thoughts about themselves, others, and the world are actually true.
- She links stubborn thinking to confirmation bias, the habit of favoring information that backs up what we already believe.
- Cook points to research showing bias-awareness training and perspective-taking exercises can measurably boost open-mindedness.
A Yale Psychologist Makes the Case for Doubting Yourself
Joan M. Cook, a trauma psychologist and professor in the Psychiatry Department at Yale School of Medicine, laid out her argument plainly. “We’re human, so it’s not possible or even realistic to expect that every belief we hold is accurate,” she wrote in TIME. Her point is not that beliefs don’t matter. It’s that nobody gets every one of them right, and pretending otherwise causes problems.
Cook’s background gives the claim weight. She works directly with patients wrestling with trauma, a field where rigid thinking can trap people in painful loops. Her op-ed frames open-mindedness not as a soft personality trait but as a skill that can be practiced and sharpened, much like any other habit a person builds over time through repetition.
The Detective Method: Putting Your Own Thoughts on Trial
Cook’s central technique is simple to describe, harder to do. “I encourage the people I work with to put on their detective caps and determine if what they are thinking is true,” she wrote. That means treating a belief about yourself, another person, or the world the way a detective treats a tip: worth checking, not worth assuming.
This isn’t a call to doubt everything equally or treat every claim as plausible. Researchers who study the concept draw a sharp line between open-mindedness and simple neutrality. Fair consideration of alternatives paired with a willingness to update beliefs when evidence demands it looks very different from refusing to hold any firm position at all.
Confirmation Bias: The Mental Habit That Blocks Growth
Cook names a specific culprit behind closed thinking: confirmation bias. She describes it as a tendency to overtrust assumptions we already favor and to seek out information that matches what we already believe. It’s a mental shortcut that feels efficient in the moment but quietly narrows what a person is willing to consider or accept.
What the Research Says About Changing Minds
Cook doesn’t rest her case on personal opinion alone. She points to a comprehensive review of interventions aimed at increasing open-mindedness, citing bias-awareness training and perspective-taking exercises as approaches that show real effects. That review, part of a broader academic effort to study open-mindedness across disciplines, catalogs which techniques work and which fall flat.
One related strand of research ties this directly to the polarized moment we’re living through. Studies on intellectual humility, the willingness to admit the limits of what you know, link it to lower levels of political and religious polarization. That connection suggests Cook’s advice reaches beyond therapy sessions and into the way Americans argue with each other every day.
Other scholars warn the training isn’t risk-free. One review notes that teaching people about their biases can backfire if they feel personally attacked, producing defensiveness instead of reflection. That’s a useful caution for anyone eager to lecture family members at Thanksgiving about their blind spots rather than modeling the habit themselves.
Why Open-Mindedness Isn’t the Same as Having No Standards
Readers have every reason to be wary of “open-mindedness” rhetoric when it’s used to pressure people into abandoning sound judgment or settled truths. But that’s not what Cook is describing. Her version demands evidence, self-scrutiny, and honesty about one’s own errors, not surrender to whatever argument is loudest or most fashionable.
Scholars studying this distinction separate intellectual humility from open-mindedness for exactly this reason. One can admit uncertainty about a belief while still refusing to treat every competing claim as equally valid. That distinction protects the core of Cook’s advice from being twisted into an excuse for abandoning common sense or caving to social pressure.
The takeaway is less about politics and more about personal discipline. Check your assumptions, especially the ones that feel obviously true. Ask where the evidence actually leads. That habit, practiced honestly, strengthens convictions worth keeping and clears out the ones that never deserved space in your head to begin with.
Sources:
time.com, cambridge.org, tandfonline.com, journals.sagepub.com, psycnet.apa.org
