Yeah. The opponent's move is establishing "you can change your mind and adopt my opinion" as the criterion to measure your open-mindedness. If you can switch to their position, you are allowed to keep calling yourself open-minded; if you don't, you lose that right. (The rational answer would be: yes, you are capable of adopting any position, including theirs, when there is a good reason to do so. Open-mindedness does not mean adopting random positions for no good reason, or simply because someone calls you a chicken if you don't.) So the essence of the move is "I decide what is the true (costly) signal of the trait you claim to have". And the choice of the signal is obviously self-serving. I mean, in theory, they could have asked you to demonstrate your open-mindedness by adoption a position they don't agree with; that would be an equally valid proof of your ability to change your mind. But of course there is no incentive for them to do so. Which shows that evaluating your open-mindedness impartially was never the true goal here. Another thing is that there is a difference between "being open-minded" and "signaling open-mindedness". Just because you are capable of adopting various kinds of positions, doesn't mean that you should. To consider options X, Y, Z, and afterwards decide to stay with the original X, can be perfectly open-minded, even if from outside it may be difficult to distinguish from "the person did not consider Y and Z at all". (It's like when a gifted child solves a mathematical problem too fast, and the teacher accuses them of merely guessing the answer. There is a difference between doing the work, and demonstrating to other people that you did the work.) Shortly: * open-mindedness does not mean "doing what you want me to do"; that's called social pressure * it is perfectly open-minded to consider a hypothesis... and then reject it

A more transparent term would be psychologizing: [...] See also Ayn Rand on this topic: [...] (Lots more ranting about psychologizers. Schopenhauer energy.)