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confirming their beliefs about controversial issues. When participants were then given a chance to get paid if they read contrary arguments, two-thirds decided they would rather not even look at the counterarguments, never mind seriously entertain them. The aversion to contrary ideas is not a simple artifact of stupidity or ignorance. Yale law and psychology professor Dan Kahan has shown that more scientifically literate adults are actually more likely to become dogmatic about politically polarizing topics in science. Kahan thinks it could be because they are better at finding evidence to confirm their feelings: the more time they spend on the topic, the more hedgehog-like they become.

In a study during the run-up to the Brexit vote, a small majority of both Remainers and Brexiters were able to correctly interpret made-up statistics about the efficacy of a rash-curing skin cream, but when voters were given the same exact data presented as if it indicated that immigration either increased or decreased crime, hordes of Brits suddenly became innumerate and misinterpreted statistics that disagreed with their political beliefs. Kahan found the same phenomenon in the United States using skin cream and gun control. Kahan also documented a personality feature that fought back against that propensity: science curiosity. Not science knowledge, science curiosity.

Kahan and colleagues measured science curiosity cleverly, smuggling relevant questions into what looked like consumer marketing surveys, and tracking how people pursued follow-up information after viewing videos with particular content, some of them science-related. The most science-curious folk always chose to look at new evidence, whether or not it agreed with their current beliefs. Less science-curious adults were like hedgehogs: they became more resistant to contrary evidence and more politically polarized as they gained subject matter knowledge. Those who were high in science curiosity bucked that trend. Their foxy hunt for information was like a literal fox’s hunt for prey: roam freely, listen carefully, and consume omnivorously. Just as Tetlock says of the best forecasters, it is not what they think, but how they think. The best forecasters are high in active open-mindedness. They are also extremely curious, and don’t merely consider contrary ideas, they proactively cross disciplines looking for them. “Depth can be inadequate without breadth,” wrote Jonathan Baron, the psychologist who developed measurements of active open-mindedness.

Charles Darwin must have been one of the most curious and actively open-minded human beings in history. His first four models of evolution were forms of creationism or intelligent design. (The fifth model treated creation as a separate question.) He made a point of copying into his notes any fact or observation he encountered that ran contrary to a theory he was working on. He relentlessly attacked his own ideas, dispensing with one model after another, until he arrived at a theory that fit the totality of the evidence. But before he even started on that life’s work, he needed a push from an actively open-minded teammate—or mentor, really. John Stevens Henslow was the priest, geologist, and botany professor who arranged Darwin’s place aboard the HMS Beagle. Before the ship set sail, he told Darwin to read a controversial new book, Principles of Geology, by Charles Lyell. Lyell argued that Earth had changed very gradually over time by processes that continued in the present. Henslow could not accept Lyell’s description of geology as entirely separate from theology, warning Darwin “on no account to accept the views therein advocated.” But, in foxlike fashion, he set aside his own revulsion and urged his mentee to read the book. It was a revelation. According to science historian Janet Browne, “In one of the most remarkable interchanges in the history of science, Lyell’s book taught Darwin how to think about nature.”

None of this is to say that hedgehog experts are unnecessary. They produce vital knowledge. Einstein was a hedgehog. He saw simplicity beneath complexity, and found elegant theories to prove it. But he also spent the last thirty years of his life in a rigid quest for a single theory of everything that would explain away the messy apparent randomness inherent to quantum mechanics, a field spawned in part by his own work. As astrophysicist Glen Mackie wrote, “A consensus seems to exist: in later years, Einstein worked with mathematical blinkers, immune to relevant discoveries, and unable to change his method of investigation.” God does not play dice with the universe, Einstein asserted, figuratively. Niels Bohr, his contemporary who illuminated the structure of atoms (using analogies to Saturn’s rings and the solar system), replied that Einstein should keep an