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Whenever we talk about the Big Five personality traits, one stands apart from them all: Openness to experiences. All the other traits are easy to define: Extroversion is, well, extroversion. Conscientiousness is basically “grit” and organization skills. Agreeableness is niceness. Neuroticism is depression and anxiety.
But openness … what is openness exactly? It’s correlated with a bunch of stuff, like being spiritual but not religious, and being sexually adventurous, and creative and art-loving, and educated, and socially liberal, and good with words. But what is the thing underpinning all those other things? Back in the 50s, openness was called being “cultured,” but … whose culture are we talking about exactly?
And once you dig deeper into openness, it gets even weirder. Unlike the other personality traits, very few people say they want to either increase or decrease on openness. The trait doesn’t predict wealth or longevity or health like some of the other traits do. And some cultures don’t even have a trait like openness. They have people who are creative and liberal and so forth, but they don’t call it “openness.”
The guest on the latest episode of Why We’re Like This is Ted Schwaba, a psychologist at Michigan State University and an expert on openness to experiences. He joined me to talk about what openness is, how it benefits us, and how you can increase on openness if you want to—though you probably won’t want to.
Some highlights from our conversation are below:
Olga: To kick things off, what is openness to experiences?
Ted Schwaba: The really short version would be people who are more creative and more curious and who like learning and who are more intellectual. But there’s also all these fun things that go along with it: People who are high on openness to experience, they feel more awe. They like to be more reflective about their emotions and their inner lives. They really enjoy art and poetry and reading and they’re kind of unconventional and odd. The people who are listening to this right now, they’re learning about science for fun—that’s a super open-to-experience activity.
Olga: Is openness like the same as intelligence? And if not, how is it different?
Ted: That’s actually a debate that’s gone back like 60 years because way back in the day, people were afraid that we’re just going to be studying intelligence if we’re measuring openness to experience. But they’re really not the same thing. They’ve got a correlation of like .2. So on average, people who are more open to experience tend to be a little bit more intelligent. But you probably know people who love art but they’re not the brightest bulbs and other people who are really, really smart and they’re like, “no no no, I don’t want to go to the museum.”
The theory is that a lot of these things go together because open people are curious, so they spend their whole lives learning, and if you spend your whole life learning and you like going to school, then you get smarter.
Olga: I’ve come across a lot of studies that suggest that openness is associated with political liberalism. And I was wondering how strong that association is. Is it true that open people tend to be more liberal? And if so, how does that fit together exactly?
Ted: The correlations aren’t super strong, but they’re not anything to ignore either. They’re about .1 to .2. They’re stronger in the US, I think, than in other places. And it’s mostly with social liberalism, rather than economic leftism. But in the US, you find that people who are more open tend to vote Democrat.
And I think that we might be seeing this increase in terms of like this coupling in the future. This is my hypothesis. We’re really seeing this kind of political polarization play out in the US right now, where people who have college degrees and above are tending to move further leftwards and people who don’t have college degrees are moving further rightwards. And openness is really highly correlated with people’s educational attainment. So if education is starting to go along with politics and openness goes with education, I think openness is going to start going along with politics more.
Olga: Okay, so why is openness not quite like all the other personality traits? And you recently wrote a paper about this that I’d love for you to summarize.
Ted: One of the things that is nice about the Big Five is you can study them all together. But one of the things that kind of slips through the cracks is that when there’s a weird result for like a certain trait, you kind of brush over it. People will say, yeah, most of the time people love to change their personality traits and they really have this desire to change. But we don’t see that for openness to experience. They love talking about “I want to be more extroverted,” “I don’t want to be so anxious and depressed,” “I want to be more organized,” but no one’s like, “I wish I had more sensitivity to art.” I think that’s a really curious finding, but we really haven’t talked about it much as a field because we’re kind of focused on the idea more generally of people wanting to change their personality.
So volitional change is one of them. Deciding on a name is another one. Like all the other big five traits, everyone’s like, oh yeah, extroversion. Everyone calls it extroversion. But there are some questionnaires that call openness to experience “intellect.” There are some questionnaires that call it “open-mindedness.” There are some way back from the ‘50s that call it being “cultured.” The fact that people can’t even agree on a name for it suggests that we’re not really agreeing on what’s inside of it or what it means or what’s going on with it.
Olga: It’s interesting you said people don’t want to increase on openness and that’s so true. All of Nate Hudson’s studies [the studies that underpin my book] say like, “but of course for openness we did not find a result because literally no one picked that one and we have no idea what’s up with that.”
When I was talking to you and I think quote you in the book saying this, you said openness is people “becoming more who they are.” Open people want to become more open and closed people just don’t. Why is it that people don’t really feel motivated to change on this trait? Why is it that this is the one where we’re just like, “I like being where I am on this.”
Ted: Right now we’ve got two theories. One of them could be people are just happy with where they are. If you ask someone who isn’t very creative and curious to do creative and curious things, they’re like, “why would I want to do that? I’m happy how I am.” And people who are creative and curious, they want to be more that way. But there’s nothing punishing you for being how you are.
People who are high on neuroticism, our whole lives are punishment, you know? It’s just like going from one anxiety provoking thing to another. And people who are low on conscientiousness, people are like, “why weren’t you on time? Bad grade, you didn’t turn that in on time.” There’s just not the punishments for lacking [openess], because there really is no “lack.”
But I think another option, and this might be a little less likely, but I think could be the case, is people might have more of this fixed mindset regarding openness. So people might not think that they can become more intellectual, or they can become more curious. They might be thinking, yeah, that’s just how intellectual I am.
Olga: So does openness have any benefits? Is there any upside to being super open?
Ted: I mean, have you ever like read a book and just felt this sense of like awe and just like, “wow, my mind is blown.” I think that that is the reward of openness. I think it’s more this intra-psychically valuable thing. I think that there’s something beautiful about experiencing something that’s totally novel and that kind of changes your conception of how the world can even work. But that’s not going to make you live longer and it’s not going to make you a lot more money.
