What Is The Openness Personality Trait?


By Olivia Reed

Openness to Experience, often just called Openness, is one of the five major dimensions of personality that make up the widely-accepted Five Factor Model (FFM) of personality, also known as the Big Five.  The Big Five traits - Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism - describe broad dimensions of personality that manifest in more specific patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving.

So what exactly does Openness entail? Let's take a closer look at this personality dimension.

Definition and Key Characteristics 

Openness to Experience captures individual differences in the breadth, depth, originality and complexity of a person's mental life and experiential world. Highly open people are imaginative, curious, sensitive to art and beauty, emotionally differentiated, behaviorally flexible, intellectually curious, and liberal in values. Low scorers on Openness (those who are "closed") tend to be down-to-earth, conventional, uninterested in art, unanalytical, unimaginative, practical and traditional.

Some of the key facets or elements of Openness include:

  • Imagination: Open people have vivid imaginations and rich fantasy lives. They use fantasy to create an interesting inner world. Closed people are more literal and down-to-earth. 
  • Aesthetic Sensitivity: High scorers on Openness appreciate beauty and are moved by art, music, poetry and nature. They are sensitive to and appreciative of varied sensory experiences. Low scorers are relatively insensitive to art and beauty.
  • Emotional Depth: Openness is associated with receptivity to inner emotional states and feelings. Open people experience both positive and negative emotions more intensely than closed people. They feel joy, love and excitement at a deeper level, but may also feel anxiety or melancholy more strongly.
  • Curiosity and Inquisitiveness: Open people are curious about the inner and outer world. They are intellectually curious, pursue knowledge for its own sake, and enjoy entertaining new ideas. Low scorers on Openness prefer the familiar and conventional, having little curiosity about different ideas, people or experiences.
  • Unconventionality: High scorers on Openness are willing to question authority and are open to non-traditional values and ideas. They are ready to both absorb and generate new ideas. Low Openness scorers prefer the familiar and traditional over the novel and unconventional.

In sum, Openness describes a dimension of personality that ranges from intellectual, imaginative, creative and open at one end to closed, unimaginative, conventional and tradition-bound at the other. Openness colors and flavors the nature of a person's inner experience and how they engage with the outer world.

Origins and Stability

Like the other Big Five traits, Openness is believed to have both biological and environmental origins. Twin studies suggest Openness is about 57% heritable, indicating genetics play an important role. However, this means environment also has a substantial influence in the development of Openness.

Openness, like most traits, shows a pattern of increasing stability across the lifespan. It is moderately stable in childhood but becomes increasingly more stable throughout adolescence and adulthood. By late adulthood, individual differences in Openness are largely fixed and stable. However, people do still show some plasticity and capacity for change at all ages.

In terms of mean-level changes, Openness tends to peak in adolescence and early adulthood before declining slightly in late adulthood. However, these declines are modest and Openness remains relatively stable across the lifespan compared to traits like Neuroticism.

Outcomes and Implications

Research has linked Openness with a number of important life outcomes:

  • Creativity and Divergent Thinking: Highly open people are more creative, original in their thinking, and excel at divergent thinking tasks that require generating new ideas. Openness is considered one of the key traits underlying creative thought and achievement.
  • Educational Achievement: Openness predicts greater educational achievement, likely due to open individuals' love of learning and intellectual curiosity. They are more likely to seek out advanced degrees.
  • Artistic and Scientific Interests: Open people gravitate towards artistic and investigative careers and hobbies, such as visual arts, music, writing, and science. They find creative and intellectual pursuits intrinsically rewarding.
  • Political Liberalism: High scorers on Openness tend to be politically liberal and tolerant of diversity. They are open to social change and new ways of doing things. Low scorers tend to be more politically conservative and tradition-bound.
  • Psychological Flexibility and Growth: Openness is associated with greater self-awareness, more differentiated emotional experiences, and self-actualization. Open people experience personal growth throughout life.

In summary, Openness is a fundamentally important dimension of personality associated with creativity, intellect, personal growth, and open-mindedness in both attitudes and experiences. It flavors many aspects of a person's inner mental landscape and outer behavioral choices. While open people can be impractical or prone to fantasy, they enrich their own lives and the world through their imaginative, aesthetic and unconventional leanings. Both open and closed styles have their advantages and drawbacks - the key is finding the right person-environment fit.


Explore other Big Five personality trait models: 


References:

McCrae, R. R., & Costa Jr, P. T. (1997). Conceptions and correlates of openness to experience. In Handbook of personality psychology (pp. 825-847). Academic Press.

Kaufman, S. B., Quilty, L. C., Grazioplene, R. G., Hirsh, J. B., Gray, J. R., Peterson, J. B., & DeYoung, C. G. (2016). Openness to experience and intellect differentially predict creative achievement in the arts and sciences. Journal of personality, 84(2), 248-258.

Woo, S. E., Chernyshenko, O. S., Longley, A., Zhang, Z. X., Chiu, C. Y., & Stark, S. E. (2014). Openness to experience: Its lower level structure, measurement, and cross-cultural equivalence. Journal of personality assessment, 96(1), 29-45.