Openness: The Personality Trait Behind Curiosity and Imagination

Openness to experience is one of the five dimensions of the Big Five. It’s the trait that defines originality, the breadth and complexity of mental life, and tolerance for the unknown.

This trait marks creative, intellectually curious minds: people who, instead of feeling novelty as a threat, experience it as something stimulating and pleasant.

For example, someone high in openness usually enjoys trying a dish they’ve never eaten or visiting a country whose culture is completely unfamiliar to them.

In a sense, openness works as a need of the mind: to explore abstract ideas, to appreciate beauty in art, music, or design, and to question norms instead of taking them for granted.

McCrae and Costa (1997) describe it as having two components: a broader, more permeable mental structure that lets in more thoughts, sensations, and nuances, and a motivation to seek out new experiences. That’s why people who score high find a changing, varied environment stimulating, and a monotonous one weighs on them more than on others.

Unlike conscientiousness, openness is generally not one of the traits that best predict job performance.

It does, however, predict it notably in roles that call for creativity or adaptability to change, such as design, research, or managing innovative projects.

This article is for general information and is no substitute for an individual assessment by a qualified professional.

The origin of the Big Five and how the trait is measured

The scientific study of personality managed to unify its criteria thanks to what is known as the lexical approach: the idea that the personality traits that matter most for social life have, over time, been captured in the words of everyday language.

That story, from Allport to Goldberg, is told in the lexical hypothesis. What matters for this trait is that Paul Costa and Robert McCrae included it in their NEO model (neuroticism, extraversion, and openness) from the start, even before adding agreeableness and conscientiousness.

Today it is measured with inventories such as the NEO-PI-R or the Big Five Inventory (BFI) by Oliver John, Eileen Donahue, and Richard Kentle, which assesses traits using short phrases placed in context rather than single adjectives like “curious” or “imaginative,” which each person may interpret differently.

The domains that build an open mind

Openness isn’t a single attitude. Costa and McCrae’s NEO-PI-R divides it into six facets:

• Fantasy: a rich inner world, with an ease for imagining in detail scenarios that have never happened.
• Aesthetics: the capacity to be moved by art, music, or poetry, not as something decorative but as an important part of life.
• Feelings: attention to one’s own emotions and valuing the experience of feeling them intensely, both pleasant and unpleasant ones.
• Actions: a liking for trying new activities, traveling to unfamiliar places, or changing routines, as opposed to a preference for the familiar.
• Ideas: intellectual curiosity and a taste for arguments and abstract problems. This is the person who watches a documentary on a subject they know little about for the pleasure of understanding it.
• Values: a willingness to reexamine social, political, or religious norms instead of accepting them because “that’s how it’s always been done.”

DeYoung, Quilty, and Peterson (2007) showed that these facets group into two aspects: Intellect (mainly ideas) and Openness in the narrow sense (fantasy, aesthetics, feelings). The distinction explains why the lexical tradition called this factor “Intellect,” a debate we cover in whether the Big Five and the Five-Factor Model are the same thing.

Openness within the Plasticity meta-trait

The Big Five traits aren’t fully independent: they group into two higher-order factors. Openness, together with extraversion, forms the one called Plasticity (DeYoung, 2006). The name doesn’t refer to brain plasticity: it’s the label for a meta-trait that captures the tendency to explore and engage with the new. In extraversion that exploration is social; in openness, it’s mainly cognitive and aesthetic.

In practice, people who score high tend to feel comfortable with ambiguity and experience the unexpected as interesting problems rather than disruptions to their routine. People who score low bring the opposite: a preference for the tried and tested, practical sense, and consistency in their habits, which is valuable in tasks where innovation isn’t the goal.

How openness varies with age

Personality isn’t a static block. The meta-analysis by Roberts, Walton, and Viechtbauer (2006), covering 92 longitudinal samples, describes a fairly clear curve for openness.

It increases during adolescence and young adulthood: the stage when people try out new identities, ideas, and groups. In adulthood it stays fairly stable, and in old age it declines. This is an average trend: some people keep seeking novelty at eighty.

Openness, creativity, and leadership

Of the five traits, openness is the one most strongly related to creativity: Feist’s (1998) meta-analysis placed it among the traits that best distinguish creative artists and scientists from their less creative peers. It’s also associated with leadership: in the meta-analysis by Judge, Bono, Ilies, and Gerhardt (2002), its correlation with leadership was 0.24, behind extraversion and conscientiousness.

Two sides: culture and experience

Some instruments used in Spain, such as the BFQ questionnaire by Caprara, Barbaranelli, and Borgogni, call this factor “open-mindedness” and break it down into two subdimensions.

Openness to culture measures interest in reading, in keeping informed about what’s happening in the world, and in continuous learning.

It describes someone who thrives in intellectually stimulating environments.

Openness to experience, in this breakdown, assesses the willingness to accept changes in routine, look for alternative solutions to a problem, and enter unfamiliar contexts without resistance.

Scientific backing: the hardest factor to put into words

According to Robert McCrae (1990), openness is the Big Five factor least well captured by everyday vocabulary.

English, for example, has hardly any common adjectives for aesthetic sensitivity (the closest word, “artistic,” describes someone who makes art, not someone who appreciates it).

This partly explains why the factor was harder to identify than the other four during the early phase of lexical research, when scientists combed the dictionary for words describing personality traits.

Heritable basis and cross-cultural validity

Even so, like the rest of the five factors, it has a moderate heritable basis, shown in twin studies, and it replicates in observer ratings across 50 cultures (McCrae, Terracciano et al., 2005). It is also the factor that replicates worst in non-Western societies, as explained in the criticisms of the Big Five.

One of its most cited correlates is its link with social and political attitudes: McCrae (1996) reviewed the evidence that people with high scores tend to be more receptive to social change and liberal positions, while those with low scores tend to place more value on tradition.

There’s also an interesting crossover with another test on the site: the “Sensing-Intuition” preference of the MBTI correlates at around 0.7 with this same factor (McCrae and Costa, 1989): people who come out “intuitive” on the MBTI usually score high on openness.

Outside questionnaires, the trait leaves some curious traces. People with synesthesia, who see colors in letters or days of the week, score somewhat higher on openness on average, and openness is also the trait that best predicts who gets chills from music.

You can check your own level of openness, along with the other traits, by taking our Big Five test.

Sources

• John, O. P., Donahue, E. M. and Kentle, R. L. (1991). The Big Five Inventory: Versions 4a and 54. University of California, Berkeley, Institute of Personality and Social Research.
• McCrae, R. R. (1990). Traits and trait names: How well is Openness represented in natural languages? European Journal of Personality, 4(2), 119-129.
• McCrae, R. R., Terracciano, A. et al. (2005). Universal features of personality traits from the observer’s perspective: Data from 50 cultures. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 88(3), 547-561.
• McCrae, R. R. and Costa, P. T. (1989). Reinterpreting the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator from the perspective of the five-factor model of personality. Journal of Personality, 57(1), 17-40.
• McCrae, R. R. (1996). Social consequences of experiential openness. Psychological Bulletin, 120(3), 323-337.
• McCrae, R. R. and Costa, P. T. (1997). Conceptions and correlates of openness to experience. In R. Hogan, J. Johnson and S. Briggs (Eds.), Handbook of personality psychology (pp. 825-847). Academic Press.
• Feist, G. J. (1998). A meta-analysis of personality in scientific and artistic creativity. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 2(4), 290-309.
• Costa, P. T. and McCrae, R. R. (1992). Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R) and NEO Five-Factor Inventory (NEO-FFI) professional manual. Psychological Assessment Resources.
• Caprara, G. V., Barbaranelli, C. and Borgogni, L. (1993). BFQ: Big Five Questionnaire. Organizzazioni Speciali.
• DeYoung, C. G. (2006). Higher-order factors of the Big Five in a multi-informant sample. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 91(6), 1138-1151.
• DeYoung, C. G., Quilty, L. C. and Peterson, J. B. (2007). Between facets and domains: 10 aspects of the Big Five. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 93(5), 880-896.
• Judge, T. A., Bono, J. E., Ilies, R. and Gerhardt, M. W. (2002). Personality and leadership: A qualitative and quantitative review. Journal of Applied Psychology, 87(4), 765-780.
• Roberts, B. W., Walton, K. E. and Viechtbauer, W. (2006). Patterns of mean-level change in personality traits across the life course: A meta-analysis of longitudinal studies. Psychological Bulletin, 132(1), 1-25.