Everyone is biased. The degree of our bias is relative to others.
Open-minded people are receptive to new ideas or arguments. They seek to be unprejudiced, unbigoted truth hunters. They gather facts and then use logic and reason to form their opinions.
Closed-minded people are unreceptive to new ideas or arguments. It's hard to argue with, much less convince, a closed-minded person. More often than not, they lack the facts necessary to arrive at informed opinions. If presented with the facts, they either dismiss them or rigidly hold on to their opinion in spite of the facts.
When I say that I am politically independent I
mean that I am not rigidly attached to any U.S. political party. That
said, I cannot think of any plausible circumstance in which I would vote for a
Democrat. But that does not mean that I am rigidly attached to the Republican Party. I have done my due diligence and gathered the facts about both major U.S. political parties and their histories could not be more different.
I am receptive to all well-developed fact-based ideas and arguments. I am nonreceptive, even dismissive, of poorly-inspected ideas or ill-considered arguments based on hearsay, pure emotion, or insupportable ideological beliefs.
