Openness to experience
The breadth, depth and permeability of a person's mental life: appetite for ideas, art, novelty, feeling and unconventional views. High scorers are curious and imaginative; low scorers are practical, conventional and prefer the familiar.
What drives it
Tells you how a person handles the new: whether novelty registers as interesting or as noise and threat. Useful because it predicts who will champion change, who will resist it, and political and aesthetic leanings, more reliably than any other trait.
How it shows
Work
High: asks 'what if we did it completely differently?', reads widely outside their field, gets bored with execution once the idea is solved, can be impractical. Low: 'what's wrong with how we do it now?', excellent at running a known process, sceptical of abstraction, impatient with brainstorming. High openness predicts creative achievement and adaptability to change; it predicts job performance only weakly.
Relationships
High: wants new places, conversations about meaning, tolerant of unconventional arrangements. Low: values routine, tradition and predictability, can find a high-openness partner restless or unserious. Large gaps here produce chronic low-grade boredom on one side and destabilisation on the other.
Self
High: you feel restless and flat when life is repetitive, and you are drawn to ideas for their own sake. Low: unfamiliar ideas feel pointless rather than exciting, and you trust what has worked. Ask yourself whether you seek novelty or merely tolerate it.
What tells it apart
Extraversion: Openness is appetite for new ideas and experiences; extraversion is appetite for people and reward. The introvert who reads three books a week on unfamiliar subjects is high in openness and low in extraversion.
Need for cognitive closure: Low openness is a stable preference for the familiar even when relaxed; high need for closure spikes under time pressure and fatigue. Check whether the rigidity is there on a calm Sunday.
Hypomanic (manic) character: High openness produces curiosity that can sit still with an idea; hypomanic flight from idea to idea is driven by avoiding low mood, and the person cannot tolerate staying with one thing when it turns dull or sad.
A test
Offer an unconventional proposal with no immediate payoff and watch the first reaction: interest and questions, or a search for the flaw.
Questions to carry
- Shown an odd proposal with no payoff yet, what is the first thing they ask?
- When something new is put in front of me, how fast do I start looking for the flaw?
How strong the research is
strong
Where it comes from
Paul Costa and Robert McCrae, late 1970s to 1985; the lexical 'Intellect' factor from Warren Norman and Lewis Goldberg
On the family tree: Paul Costa and Robert McCrae
Sources
- Paul T. Costa Jr and Robert R. McCrae, The NEO Personality Inventory Manual (1985)
- Daniel Nettle, Personality: What Makes You the Way You Are (2007)