Actively Open-Minded Thinking

Suppose you have decided to spend ten minutes on making a decision between A and B. Currently you're leaning towards A. Do you:

1. Spend most of the ten minutes thinking of reasons to do A?

2. Spend about equal amounts of time thinking of reasons to do A, and reasons to think of doing B?

3. Spend most of the ten minutes thinking of reasons to do B?

Our usual decision is to do (1). This is an aspect of the confirmation bias.

Part of Actively Open-Minded Thinking (AOMT), as advocated by Baron, is to try to instead do (2) or (3). This is hard to get in the habit of doing.

I find Actively Open-Minded Thinking very useful. For example, twice a day I think about an aspect of a current plan I have for the day, month, or lifetime, and then I briefly try to search for alternative strategies, or for reasons why my current strategy might be wrong; on multiple occasions this has caused me to adopt new courses of action. It's irrational, given that you're going to spend X minutes meditating on a decision anyway, to spend most of the time thinking of ways to rationalize your current decision. In fact, it's so clearly irrational that I'm retroactively surprised that AOMT never became widespread.