Openness to experience
Openness is a psychological trait with profound implications for your take on the world
Image: drpaulbythesea.com
Let's start with a short yes/no Quiz
1. Have you worked or studied overseas?
2. Did you vote for a liberal candidate in the last election?
3. Have you experimented with drugs?
4. Have you ever had unusual experiences (hearing voices, feeling unseen presences, seeing images that weren’t there)
5. Do you prefer country music?
Open people see the world differently. When different images are shown simultaneously to the left and right eyes more conscientious people rapidly resolve the visual conflict – and see only one of the images. Open people continue to see both images as a mash-up, or as alternating images. This is a small effect but it illustrates how open people operate – they keep an open mind and see different perspectives.
What is openness to experience (shortened here to ‘open’, ‘openness’ and ‘openminded’)? Openness is associated with adjectives such as ‘intelligent,’ ‘imaginative,’ ‘original,’ insightful,’ ‘curious,’ ‘broad-minded,’ and ‘artistically sensitive.’
The openminded experience the world as more complex – the ideas and images they see, the emotions that they experience, and their sensitivity to the attitudes and motivations of the people they work and play with – all of these are heightened and more complex.
The Kiwi OE
The grandfather of organisational psychology in New Zealand Kerr Inkson studied what happened when Kiwis come back from their OE. The experience lifted their open-mindedness. Some of these people had bad experiences such as being mugged and robbed. But all of them had connected with people who had some profoundly different takes on the world (different priorities around timeliness, or of fitting in or sticking out - individualistic vs. collectivist, or liking unique and wonderful foods). These experiences seem to have opened their minds.
Work, creativity and openness
More openness results in more creative contributions. A 45-year follow-up of American graduates by Steven Soldz and George Vaillant found that the openness dimension of the ‘Big Five’ predicted who would produce creative work over their career (such as publications, patents, and winning prizes).
Does this creativity pay off? A January 2023 meta-analysis of the relationship between personality and earnings by Giammarco Alderotti and colleagues (controlling for cognitive abilities and qualifications) indicated two personality traits made a serious impact on the level of earnings. Conscientious is perhaps more predictable, and Openness is the other – indicating that creativity and other aspects of openness are valued in the job market.
Liberal
It’s a moderate but consistent result across different countries and political systems. More open people vote more liberal. As a counterfactual – people low on openness (and highly conscientious) were targeted in the 2017 Republican campaign with ads warning them that if Hillary Clinton won she would take away their guns.
There is a boundary condition to this openness-liberal political decision link. New Zealand researchers looked across different countries and controlled for the ‘threat’ that voters were experiencing. One of the threats was the rate of homicide. Homicide varies radically across countries – Japan tracks about 7 people murdered per million people, in contrast, Jamaica hits 450 per million (with Central American states close to these rates). You might not know what the actual rate of homicide is in your neighbourhood, but you are likely to pick up clues if there is a risk to you and your family. Researchers Jorge Cuartas and Amanda L Roy studied youths in Bogata, Columbia and detected higher levels of mental health disorders and higher PTSD ratings according to the local risk of homicide. The openminded-liberal relationship evaporates in such threatening situations. In such a threatening context previously open-minded people decide it's time for continuity and stability.
This limit on openness in threatening societies could explain why we see more creativity out of liberal democracies than tyrannies. For example – think of K-Pop, movies and TV shows – which of the Koreas is getting the ratings?
Drugs
Robert McCrae, a leading personality researcher and the co-developer of one of the big Big Five assessment tools (the NEO PI-R) cautions that openness is not all good news. He refers to higher rates of nightmares, more depression and greater drug use.
Recent research indicates that it is more nervous people who are more prone to nightmares. Open people are slightly more likely to experience lucid dreaming – being aware in the course of a dream that you’re dreaming.
A recent review of personality correlates of depression doesn’t support McCrae’s view that open people are more prone to depression. Instead, it’s nervousness again.
What about drugs? Well, there are drugs and drugs. Do you mean P or psilocybin or party pills or pot? A comprehensive Australian 2021 study of 980 same-sex twin pairs found that more openness was specifically associated with the use of cannabis. High extraversion and low agreeableness were related to the use of stimulants such as cocaine and crack (and for the low agreeable, also opioid use), and high nervousness was related to the misuse of prescription drugs.
Unusual experiences
High, very high, levels of openness can mean difficulties defining the boundaries of perception. The “permeability” of experiences that characterises open people can result in unusual experiences leaking into perception. For example, thoughts can be “heard”, and heightened feelings of lightness or vertigo can be experienced as telekinesis.
Soldz and Vaillant’s 45-year follow-up noted above found that it was the open people who were more likely to have made use of mental health services in their adult lifetime.
Is it possible that the openminded are more vulnerable to conspiracy thinking? Lukasz Stasielowicz completed a meta-analysis across 127 samples – it wasn’t personality, it was a constellation of other factors that best-explained conspiracy-proneness – pseudo-scientific beliefs, religiosity, paranoia, low intelligence and narcissism defined the risk factors. Of course, those that develop and promote conspiracy theories are a different story.
Music
When a prominent politician says that they prefer country music, does that give us a clue about their personality?
A wide review and series of experiments by Peter Rentfrow and Samuel Gosling in 2003 confirmed that Open people have broad musical tastes. The openminded preferred blues, jazz, and folk, which the researchers categorised as ‘reflective and complex’ music. They were also open to ‘intense rebellious music’, including rock, alternative and heavy metal. In contrast, conscientious and low openness people preferred music that provided emotional regulation, including country music.
A recent investigation of the personality-music connection used choices of streamed music to reflect actual musical preferences. A study assessing the musical choices of over 22,000 individuals from 125 countries found that the open people were most engaged with ‘sophisticated’ music (the inspiring, dynamic qualities of classical, opera, world and jazz music). They were least inclined to the ‘mellow’ side (romantic and slow music, such as soft rock). Extroverts were keen on ‘unpretentious’ music (relaxing modes such as country and folk).
But what happens when people age? Do they stick with what they heard in the critical period of adolescence when they are marking out their unique identity? Are they like US songwriter and musician Bob Seger:
Today’s music ain’t got the same soul
I like that old-time rock ‘n’ roll
Openness does decline – at least in the boomers studied so far. We might expect that there are some who like Seger was open-minded in their youth, but less so now, and still listening to the golden hits.
Developing openness
In a recent review which included a wide range of longitudinal studies, there are three personality dimensions which drop after the early 20s – agreeableness, nervousness and openness. On all the dimensions people zoom up as they develop these traits in their teens, and then the rate of change reverses equally sharply in the early 20s, reflecting their new personality steady state.
Does that mean we are then locked into that profile? If we stay in the same system, the same social world, the same sort of work and extra activities, then probably. But change does happen – we just need to see that it is possible and take charge. If we want to become more open, what can we do?
A remarkable study provides one answer. What ‘one-trial’ intervention produces a change in openness that persists for more than a year? A big dose of psilocybin (a class A hallucinogenic drug if you are wondering). Kathryn MacLean and colleagues found increases in aesthetic appreciation, imagination, and creativity, and significant increases in trait openness following a high-dose psilocybin session. Participants who had ‘mystical experiences’ during their psilocybin session, had a boost in openness that was evident more than one year after the session.
Considering non-pharmacological approaches, what might work? We have some clues from the results so far
- travel, work and education overseas
- varying your music mix (and similarly, changing up other interests, for example setting up a book club or enrolling in a boot camp)
There are more examples – send me your suggestion and I’ll send back the emerging summary.
Going back to our quiz:
1. Have you worked or studied overseas?
2. Did you vote for a liberal candidate in the last election?
3. Have you experimented with drugs?
4. Have you ever had unusual experiences (hearing voices, feeling unseen presences, seeing images that weren’t there)
5. Do you prefer country music?
Item 5 is ‘reverse-scored’ – if you said “No” – that is a mark towards your Openness to experience score. I’d say that an overall score of four or more is an indication of your openness.