How open are you to experience?
Openness to experience is one of the domains which are used to describe human personality in the Five Factor Model. Openness involves six facets, or dimensions: active imagination (fantasy), aesthetic sensitivity, attentiveness to inner feelings, preference for variety (adventurousness), intellectual curiosity, and challenging authority (psychological liberalism). A great deal of psychometric research has demonstrated that these facets or qualities are significantly correlated. Thus, openness can be viewed as a global personality trait consisting of a set of specific traits, habits, and tendencies that cluster together.
Openness tends to be normally distributed with a small number of individuals scoring extremely high or low on the trait, and most people scoring moderately. People who score low on openness are considered to be closed to experience. They tend to be conventional and traditional in their outlook and behavior. They prefer familiar routines to new experiences, and generally have a narrower range of interests. Openness has moderate positive relationships with creativity, intelligence and knowledge. Openness is related to the psychological trait of absorption, and like absorption has a modest relationship to individual differences in hypnotic susceptibility.
Openness has more modest relationships with aspects of subjective well-being than other Five Factor Model personality traits. On the whole, openness appears to be largely unrelated to symptoms of mental disorders.
Openness to experience is usually assessed with self-report measures, although peer-reports and third-party observation are also used. Self-report measures are either lexical or based on statements. Which measure of either type is used is determined by an assessment of psychometric properties and the time and space constraints of the research being undertaken
Lexical measures use individual adjectives that reflect openness to experience traits, such as creative, intellectual, artistic, philosophical, deep. Goldberg (1992) developed a 20-word measure as part of his 100-word Big Five markers. Saucier (1994) developed a briefer 8-word measure as part of his 40-word mini-markers. However, the psychometric properties of Saucier’s original mini-markers have been found suboptimal with samples outside of North America. As a result, a systematically revised measure was developed to have better psychometric properties, the International English Mini-Markers. The International English Mini-Markers has good psychometric validity for assessing openness and other five factor personality model dimensions, both within and, especially, without American populations. Internal consistency reliability of the Openness measure is .84 for both native and non-native English-speakers.
Statement measures tend to comprise more words, and hence take up more research instrument space, than lexical measures. For example, the Openness (intellect) scale of Goldberg's International Personality Item Pool is 45 words compared Saucier or Thompson’s (2008) 8-word lexical scale for Openness. Examples of statement measure items are Love to think up new ways of doing things and Have difficulty understanding abstract ideas. Two examples of statement measures are the NEO PI-R, based on the Five Factor Model, and the HEXACO-PI-R based on the HEXACO model of personality. In these tests, openness to experience is one of the six measured personality dimensions; in both tests openness to experience has a number of facets. The NEO PI-R assesses six facets called openness to ideas, feelings, values, fantasy, aesthetics, and actions respectively. The HEXACO-PI-R assesses four facets called inquisitiveness, creativity, aesthetic appreciation, and unconventionality.
A number of studies have found that openness to experience has two major subcomponents, one related to intellectual dispositions, the other related to the experiential aspects of openness, such as aesthetic appreciation and openness to sensory experiences. These subcomponents have been referred to as intellect and experiencing openness respectively, and have a strong positive correlation (r = .55) with each other.
According to research by Sam Gosling, it is possible to assess openness by examining people's homes and work spaces. Individuals who are highly open to experience tend to have distinctive and unconventional decorations. They are also likely to have books on a wide variety of topics, a diverse music collection, and works of art on display.
Openness to experience has both motivational and structural components. People high in openness are motivated to seek new experiences and to engage in self-examination. Structurally, they have a fluid style of consciousness that allows them to make novel associations between remotely connected ideas. Closed people by contrast are more comfortable with familiar and traditional experiences.
Creativity
Openness to experience correlates with creativity, as measured by tests of divergent thinking. Openness has been linked to both artistic and scientific creativity as professional artists and scientists have been found to score higher in openness compared to members of the general population.
Intelligence and knowledge
Openness to experience correlates with intelligence, correlation coefficients ranging from about r = .30 to r = .45. Openness to experience is moderately associated with crystallized intelligence, but only weakly with fluid intelligence. A study examining the facets of openness found that the Ideas and Actions facets had modest positive correlations with fluid intelligence (r=.20 and r=.07 respectively). These mental abilities may come more easily when people are dispositionally curious and open to learning. Several studies have found positive associations between openness to experience and general knowledge. People high in openness may be more motivated to engage in intellectual pursuits that increase their knowledge. Openness to experience, especially the Ideas facet, is related to need for cognition, a motivational tendency to think about ideas, scrutinize information, and enjoy solving puzzles, and to typical intellectual engagement (a similar construct to need for cognition).
Absorption and hypnotisability
Openness to experience is strongly related to the psychological construct of absorption defined as "a disposition for having episodes of 'total' attention that fully engage one's representational (i.e. perceptual, enactive, imaginative, and ideational) resources.” The construct of absorption was developed in order to relate individual differences in hypnotisability to broader aspects of personality. The construct of absorption influenced Costa and McCrae's development of the concept of openness to experience in their original NEO model due to the independence of absorption from extraversion and neuroticism. A person's openness to becoming absorbed in experiences seems to require a more general openness to new and unusual experiences. Openness to experience, like absorption has modest positive correlations with individual differences in hypnotisability. Factor analysis has shown that the fantasy, aesthetics, and feelings facets of openness are closely related to absorption and predict hypnotisability, whereas the remaining three facets of ideas, actions, and values are largely unrelated to these constructs. This finding suggests that openness to experience may have two distinct yet related subdimensions: one related to aspects of attention and consciousness assessed by the facets of fantasy, aesthetics, and feelings; the other related to intellectual curiosity and social/political liberalism as assessed by the remaining three facets. However, all of these have a common theme of ‘openness’ in some sense. This two-dimensional view of openness to experience is particularly pertinent to hypnotisability. However, when considering external criteria other than hypnotisability, it is possible that a different dimensional structure may be apparent, e.g. intellectual curiosity may be unrelated to social/political liberalism in certain contexts.
Relationship to other personality traits
Although the factors in the Big Five model are assumed to be independent, openness to experience and extraversion as assessed in the NEO-PI-R have a substantial positive correlation. Openness to experience also has a moderate positive correlation with sensation-seeking, particularly, the experience seeking facet. In spite of this, it has been argued that openness to experience is still an independent personality dimension from these other traits because most of the variance in the trait cannot be explained by its overlap with these other constructs. A study comparing the Temperament and Character Inventory with the Five Factor model found that Openness to experience had a substantial positive correlation with self-transcendence (a "spiritual" trait) and to a lesser extent novelty seeking (conceptually similar to sensation seeking). It also had a moderate negative correlation with harm avoidance. The Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) measures the preference of "intuition," which is related to openness to experience. Robert McCrae pointed out that the MBTI sensation versus intuition scale "contrasts a preference for the factual, simple and conventional with a preference for the possible, complex, and original," and is therefore similar to measures of openness.
Social and political attitudes
There are social and political implications to this personality trait. People who are highly open to experience tend to be liberal and tolerant of diversity. As a consequence, they are generally more open to different cultures and lifestyles. They are lower in ethnocentrism, right-wing authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, and prejudice. Openness has a stronger (negative) relationship with right-wing authoritarianism than the other five-factor model traits (conscientiousness has a modest positive association, and the other traits have negligible associations). Openness has a somewhat smaller (negative) association with social dominance orientation than (low) agreeableness (the other traits have negligible associations). Openness has a stronger (negative) relationship with prejudice than the other five-factor model traits (agreeableness has a more modest negative association, and the other traits have negligible associations). However, right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation are each more strongly (positively) associated with prejudice than openness or any of the other five-factor model traits. Recent research has argued that the relationship between openness and prejudice may be more complex, as the prejudice examined was prejudice against conventional minority groups (for example sexual and ethnic minorities) and that people who are high in openness can still be intolerant of those with conflicting worldviews.
Regarding conservatism, studies have found that cultural conservatism was related to low openness and all its facets, but economic conservatism was unrelated to total openness, and only weakly negatively related to the Aesthetics and values facets. The strongest personality predictor of economic conservatism was low agreeableness (r= -.23). Economic conservatism is based more on ideology whereas cultural conservatism seems to be more psychological than ideological and may reflect a preference for simple, stable and familiar mores. Some research indicates that within-person changes in levels of openness do not predict changes in conservatism.
Subjective well-being and mental health Edit
Openness to experience has been found to have modest yet significant associations with happiness, positive affect, and quality of life and to be unrelated to life satisfaction, negative affect, and overall affect in people in general. These relationships with aspects of subjective well-being tend to be weaker compared to those of other five-factor model traits, that is, extraversion, neuroticism, conscientiousness, and agreeableness. Openness to experience was found to be associated with life satisfaction in older adults after controlling for confounding factors. Openness appears to be generally unrelated to the presence of mental disorders. A meta-analysis of the relationships between five-factor model traits and symptoms of psychological disorders found that none of the diagnostic groups examined differed from healthy controls on openness to experience.
Openness tends to be normally distributed with a small number of individuals scoring extremely high or low on the trait, and most people scoring moderately. People who score low on openness are considered to be closed to experience. They tend to be conventional and traditional in their outlook and behavior. They prefer familiar routines to new experiences, and generally have a narrower range of interests. Openness has moderate positive relationships with creativity, intelligence and knowledge. Openness is related to the psychological trait of absorption, and like absorption has a modest relationship to individual differences in hypnotic susceptibility.
Openness has more modest relationships with aspects of subjective well-being than other Five Factor Model personality traits. On the whole, openness appears to be largely unrelated to symptoms of mental disorders.
Openness to experience is usually assessed with self-report measures, although peer-reports and third-party observation are also used. Self-report measures are either lexical or based on statements. Which measure of either type is used is determined by an assessment of psychometric properties and the time and space constraints of the research being undertaken
Lexical measures use individual adjectives that reflect openness to experience traits, such as creative, intellectual, artistic, philosophical, deep. Goldberg (1992) developed a 20-word measure as part of his 100-word Big Five markers. Saucier (1994) developed a briefer 8-word measure as part of his 40-word mini-markers. However, the psychometric properties of Saucier’s original mini-markers have been found suboptimal with samples outside of North America. As a result, a systematically revised measure was developed to have better psychometric properties, the International English Mini-Markers. The International English Mini-Markers has good psychometric validity for assessing openness and other five factor personality model dimensions, both within and, especially, without American populations. Internal consistency reliability of the Openness measure is .84 for both native and non-native English-speakers.
Statement measures tend to comprise more words, and hence take up more research instrument space, than lexical measures. For example, the Openness (intellect) scale of Goldberg's International Personality Item Pool is 45 words compared Saucier or Thompson’s (2008) 8-word lexical scale for Openness. Examples of statement measure items are Love to think up new ways of doing things and Have difficulty understanding abstract ideas. Two examples of statement measures are the NEO PI-R, based on the Five Factor Model, and the HEXACO-PI-R based on the HEXACO model of personality. In these tests, openness to experience is one of the six measured personality dimensions; in both tests openness to experience has a number of facets. The NEO PI-R assesses six facets called openness to ideas, feelings, values, fantasy, aesthetics, and actions respectively. The HEXACO-PI-R assesses four facets called inquisitiveness, creativity, aesthetic appreciation, and unconventionality.
A number of studies have found that openness to experience has two major subcomponents, one related to intellectual dispositions, the other related to the experiential aspects of openness, such as aesthetic appreciation and openness to sensory experiences. These subcomponents have been referred to as intellect and experiencing openness respectively, and have a strong positive correlation (r = .55) with each other.
According to research by Sam Gosling, it is possible to assess openness by examining people's homes and work spaces. Individuals who are highly open to experience tend to have distinctive and unconventional decorations. They are also likely to have books on a wide variety of topics, a diverse music collection, and works of art on display.
Openness to experience has both motivational and structural components. People high in openness are motivated to seek new experiences and to engage in self-examination. Structurally, they have a fluid style of consciousness that allows them to make novel associations between remotely connected ideas. Closed people by contrast are more comfortable with familiar and traditional experiences.
Creativity
Openness to experience correlates with creativity, as measured by tests of divergent thinking. Openness has been linked to both artistic and scientific creativity as professional artists and scientists have been found to score higher in openness compared to members of the general population.
Intelligence and knowledge
Openness to experience correlates with intelligence, correlation coefficients ranging from about r = .30 to r = .45. Openness to experience is moderately associated with crystallized intelligence, but only weakly with fluid intelligence. A study examining the facets of openness found that the Ideas and Actions facets had modest positive correlations with fluid intelligence (r=.20 and r=.07 respectively). These mental abilities may come more easily when people are dispositionally curious and open to learning. Several studies have found positive associations between openness to experience and general knowledge. People high in openness may be more motivated to engage in intellectual pursuits that increase their knowledge. Openness to experience, especially the Ideas facet, is related to need for cognition, a motivational tendency to think about ideas, scrutinize information, and enjoy solving puzzles, and to typical intellectual engagement (a similar construct to need for cognition).
Absorption and hypnotisability
Openness to experience is strongly related to the psychological construct of absorption defined as "a disposition for having episodes of 'total' attention that fully engage one's representational (i.e. perceptual, enactive, imaginative, and ideational) resources.” The construct of absorption was developed in order to relate individual differences in hypnotisability to broader aspects of personality. The construct of absorption influenced Costa and McCrae's development of the concept of openness to experience in their original NEO model due to the independence of absorption from extraversion and neuroticism. A person's openness to becoming absorbed in experiences seems to require a more general openness to new and unusual experiences. Openness to experience, like absorption has modest positive correlations with individual differences in hypnotisability. Factor analysis has shown that the fantasy, aesthetics, and feelings facets of openness are closely related to absorption and predict hypnotisability, whereas the remaining three facets of ideas, actions, and values are largely unrelated to these constructs. This finding suggests that openness to experience may have two distinct yet related subdimensions: one related to aspects of attention and consciousness assessed by the facets of fantasy, aesthetics, and feelings; the other related to intellectual curiosity and social/political liberalism as assessed by the remaining three facets. However, all of these have a common theme of ‘openness’ in some sense. This two-dimensional view of openness to experience is particularly pertinent to hypnotisability. However, when considering external criteria other than hypnotisability, it is possible that a different dimensional structure may be apparent, e.g. intellectual curiosity may be unrelated to social/political liberalism in certain contexts.
Relationship to other personality traits
Although the factors in the Big Five model are assumed to be independent, openness to experience and extraversion as assessed in the NEO-PI-R have a substantial positive correlation. Openness to experience also has a moderate positive correlation with sensation-seeking, particularly, the experience seeking facet. In spite of this, it has been argued that openness to experience is still an independent personality dimension from these other traits because most of the variance in the trait cannot be explained by its overlap with these other constructs. A study comparing the Temperament and Character Inventory with the Five Factor model found that Openness to experience had a substantial positive correlation with self-transcendence (a "spiritual" trait) and to a lesser extent novelty seeking (conceptually similar to sensation seeking). It also had a moderate negative correlation with harm avoidance. The Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) measures the preference of "intuition," which is related to openness to experience. Robert McCrae pointed out that the MBTI sensation versus intuition scale "contrasts a preference for the factual, simple and conventional with a preference for the possible, complex, and original," and is therefore similar to measures of openness.
Social and political attitudes
There are social and political implications to this personality trait. People who are highly open to experience tend to be liberal and tolerant of diversity. As a consequence, they are generally more open to different cultures and lifestyles. They are lower in ethnocentrism, right-wing authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, and prejudice. Openness has a stronger (negative) relationship with right-wing authoritarianism than the other five-factor model traits (conscientiousness has a modest positive association, and the other traits have negligible associations). Openness has a somewhat smaller (negative) association with social dominance orientation than (low) agreeableness (the other traits have negligible associations). Openness has a stronger (negative) relationship with prejudice than the other five-factor model traits (agreeableness has a more modest negative association, and the other traits have negligible associations). However, right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation are each more strongly (positively) associated with prejudice than openness or any of the other five-factor model traits. Recent research has argued that the relationship between openness and prejudice may be more complex, as the prejudice examined was prejudice against conventional minority groups (for example sexual and ethnic minorities) and that people who are high in openness can still be intolerant of those with conflicting worldviews.
Regarding conservatism, studies have found that cultural conservatism was related to low openness and all its facets, but economic conservatism was unrelated to total openness, and only weakly negatively related to the Aesthetics and values facets. The strongest personality predictor of economic conservatism was low agreeableness (r= -.23). Economic conservatism is based more on ideology whereas cultural conservatism seems to be more psychological than ideological and may reflect a preference for simple, stable and familiar mores. Some research indicates that within-person changes in levels of openness do not predict changes in conservatism.
Subjective well-being and mental health Edit
Openness to experience has been found to have modest yet significant associations with happiness, positive affect, and quality of life and to be unrelated to life satisfaction, negative affect, and overall affect in people in general. These relationships with aspects of subjective well-being tend to be weaker compared to those of other five-factor model traits, that is, extraversion, neuroticism, conscientiousness, and agreeableness. Openness to experience was found to be associated with life satisfaction in older adults after controlling for confounding factors. Openness appears to be generally unrelated to the presence of mental disorders. A meta-analysis of the relationships between five-factor model traits and symptoms of psychological disorders found that none of the diagnostic groups examined differed from healthy controls on openness to experience.
