What is openness to experience?
When most people hear about Big Five Openness (in full, Openness to experience), they immediately picture someone who is fairly easy-going about relationships or rather liberal about their sex life — roughly the idea behind the old quip that someone looks straight-laced on the outside but is open underneath. In reality, though, the concept of Openness as psychologists generally understand it is a world away from the everyday version. One of the biggest differences is the recognition that openness to experience is actually made up of several sub-categories. So let me briefly introduce how Costa and McCrae, one of the founding pairs behind the Big Five, understood openness to experience.
Fantasy
Fantasy refers to our tendency towards abstract thinking. People high in fantasy think in more varied and abstract ways; they can find interest in dull surroundings, and they usually enjoy daydreaming. By contrast, people low in fantasy tend to think more concretely, don't spend much time off in their own world, and are generally more down-to-earth. If you have a friend who is forever daydreaming and making plans to meet up with some imaginary mate, their fantasy is probably not on the low side.
Aesthetics
Aesthetics, put simply, refers to how much we love the arts. People high in aesthetics enjoy all kinds of art, including music, poetry, painting and so on, and they often develop a deeper understanding of things. People low in aesthetics are just the opposite: they don't take pleasure in works of art, and their thinking tends to lean more on logic and hard facts.
Feelings
Feelings refers to awareness of one's own emotions and the general intensity of one's moods, and you could say it is the easiest of the five sub-categories to understand. As the name suggests, people high in feelings are usually more sentimental, and their emotions can also swing dramatically from time to time. For them, life would feel incomplete without strong emotion. By contrast, people low in feelings don't have a very rich emotional world, nor do they have much in the way of "inner drama".
Values
Values describes a person's stance towards differing value systems. People low in values usually hold firm to authority and convention, believing that people should internalise traditional values from a young age. They tend to be more loyal, and they are not easily swayed by others. People high in values, on the other hand, believe that laws and policies should have a certain flexibility, precisely so that they can accommodate the needs of different stakeholders in society. They are generally more accepting of new things, and more willing to listen to opinions that differ from their own.
Others
Beyond the four items above, openness to experience actually comprises two further sub-categories: ideas and actions, referring respectively to curiosity in thought and in behaviour. For the details, see McCrae & John (1992).
Openness to experience and love
So at the end of the day, are open people really more easy-going in their relationships? That depends, of course, on how we define "easy-going", but research does show that people high in openness to experience usually take longer to settle down with a steady partner [2]. What's more, experimental findings show that within marriage, openness to experience is positively correlated with the frequency of sex [3]. Interestingly, openness to experience seems to be unrelated to satisfaction with a romantic relationship [4].
Openness to experience and career development
The relationship between openness to experience and career development is fascinating. Research has found that ideas, one of the sub-categories of openness to experience, is positively correlated with career achievement, but people high in aesthetics and feelings tend to have more winding career paths, and their careers therefore take off later (Schwaba, 2019). In other words, depending on whether the individual sub-categories run high or low, psychologists hold that openness to experience can have either a positive or a negative relationship with career development.
The malleability of openness to experience
Whether or not you are open yourself, you may have noticed that people a generation older than you are not as keen on new experiences. In fact, in recent years more and more psychological studies have reflected the malleability of personality. It's true that, in the course of growing up, all sorts of experiences and challenges will to some degree change a person's patterns of thought and behaviour, so it makes sense that personality shifts along with them. Take openness to experience as an example: one study spanning 26 nationalities and more than 3,300 participants found that openness to experience declines with age. As for younger people, another study points to a trend of openness to experience rising over the period between the ages of 12 and 18 [5].
In closing
As one of the five major personality traits in Big Five theory, openness to experience attempts to capture how readily we take in new things. Psychological research indicates that openness to experience may be linked to our interpersonal relationships as well as to our career development. Even so, openness to experience remains fairly malleable well into adulthood. That said, this article has only introduced the concept of openness to experience in a very basic way. In reality the relevant research is extremely rich, and the author encourages interested readers to consult Costa and McCrae, as well as other academic literature.
If, having finished this article, you still find yourself full of curiosity about people, we imagine our readers will be interested in TreeholeHK's Know Thyself, Explore the Self: A Psychology Essentials Course. The course draws on psychology to boost motivation and set goals, so that you become someone who understands yourself better and stays true to who you are.
References
[1] McCrae, R. R., & John, O. P. (1992). An Introduction to the Five-Factor Model and Its Applications. Journal of Personality, 60(2), 175–215. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6494.1992.tb00970.x
[2] Schwaba, T., Robins, R., Grijalva, E., & Bleidorn, W. (2019). Does openness to experience matter in love and work? Domain, facet, and developmental evidence from a 24-year longitudinal study. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/6pemg
[3] Meltzer, A. L., & McNulty, J. K. (2016). Who is having more and better sex? The Big Five as predictors of sex in marriage. Journal of Research in Personality, 63, 62–66. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2016.05.010
[4] Malouff, J. M., Thorsteinsson, E. B., Schutte, N. S., Bhullar, N., & Rooke, S. E. (2010). The Five-Factor Model of personality and relationship satisfaction of intimate partners: A meta-analysis. Journal of Research in Personality, 44(1), 124–127. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2009.09.004
Comments
No comments yet — share your thoughts.