Openness to experience

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Openness to experience is one of the Big Five personality traits that describe how curious, imaginative, and open a person is to new ideas and experiences. It has six parts, or facets: active imagination (fantasy), aesthetic sensitivity (care about beauty), attentiveness to inner feelings, preference for variety (adventurousness), intellectual curiosity, and challenging authority (psychological liberalism). These facets usually go together, so openness is seen as a single trait made up of related habits and tendencies.

Typically, people scores on openness form a normal curve. A few people are very high or very low, while most are in the middle. People who score low on openness are often described as traditional or conventional, preferring familiar routines and having a narrower range of interests. Those high in openness tend to be creative, curious, and interested in new experiences.

What openness is linked to
- Creativity, intelligence, and knowledge: openness tends to go along with creative thinking and a desire to learn.
- Absorption and hypnotisability: there is a modest relationship with how easily someone can become absorbed in experiences or hypnotic-like states.
- Well-being: openness has only modest links to happiness and life satisfaction compared with some other traits.
- Mental health: openness is generally not linked to mental disorders.

How openness is measured
- It is usually assessed with self-report questionnaires, but friends or others who know the person can also provide ratings.
- Measures can be word-based or ask people to agree or disagree with statements.

Two big parts of openness
- Intellect: a focus on ideas, thinking, and intellectual activities.
- Experiencing openness: a focus on sensory experiences, aesthetics, and feelings.
- These two parts are strongly related and often occur together.

What openness looks like in daily life
- People high in openness often decorate their homes in distinctive and unusual ways, own books on many topics, have diverse music collections, and display art.
- They are motivated to seek new experiences and to think about themselves and the world.

Openness and thinking
- It is connected to creative performance, especially divergent thinking (thinking of many different ideas).
- It relates to both artistic creativity (artists, musicians) and scientific creativity (researchers) to some extent.
- The link with general intelligence is mixed: openness shows small to moderate links to different kinds of cognitive abilities, depending on which abilities are looked at.

Knowledge and thinking styles
- People high in openness often have more general knowledge, especially verbal knowledge, and they may enjoy intellectual pursuits more.
- They tend to score higher on need for cognition, a tendency to enjoy thinking about ideas and solving puzzles.

Dreams and fantasy
- Openness is linked to dream recall and vivid daydreaming. People who are more open often remember more about their dreams.

Politics, culture, and religion
- In many Western cultures, higher openness is associated with liberal views, tolerance of diversity, and lower prejudice.
- Openness tends to be negatively related to right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation.
- The ties to religiosity and spirituality are mixed: general religiosity is only weakly related to openness, but some forms of religious fundamentalism show a stronger negative relationship.
- Cultural and political views can be influenced by openness, but the links are not the same in every context.

Sex, sexuality, and relationships
- Open people tend to have broader sexual knowledge and more liberal attitudes about sex.
- Some studies suggest that in marriages, a wife’s openness is linked to greater sexual satisfaction for both partners.

Genetics and the brain
- Openness runs in families and is moderately to highly heritable.
- It relates to activity in brain areas involved with novelty seeking and higher-order thinking, including parts of the prefrontal cortex.

Geography and life stage
- Some regional and cultural differences exist. For example, people on certain islands or regions may score differently on openness than those on the mainland.
- Openness tends to decline slowly with age.

Drugs and openness
- Psychedelic experiences (like psilocybin) have been found to increase openness for some months afterward, especially when the experience is intense and meaningful.

Bottom line
Openness to experience describes how much a person enjoys novelty, variety, and deep thinking about ideas and feelings. It shapes creativity, learning, aesthetics, and how people respond to new experiences. It interacts with many other traits and influences a wide range of behaviors, from daily choices and hobbies to culture, politics, and even how people age.