What Openness Actually Measures (and What It Doesn't)

Of the five Big Five traits, Openness is the one that gets flattened most often. A quick test says you "like art." A pop article says you are "creative." The actual trait is wider, weirder, and more interesting than either label suggests.

This post walks through what Openness measures in the research, what the six facets look like, and the common misreads that throw people off when they see their score.

What Openness actually measures

The full name in most research is "Openness to Experience." It captures how strongly a person seeks out new ideas, art, abstract thought, unfamiliar feelings, and unconventional values ¹.

That is a big tent. A philosopher, a jazz drummer, a chemist who reads poetry on weekends, and a backpacker who refuses to plan ahead may all score high — for different reasons. The single number does not tell you which kind. The six facets do.

The six facets

Costa and McCrae's NEO model splits Openness into six narrower components ²:

• Fantasy — vivid imagination, daydreaming, comfort with internal worlds
• Aesthetics — strong response to art, music, beauty
• Feelings — awareness of and openness to one's own emotions
• Actions — willingness to try new activities and routines
• Ideas — curiosity about abstract or theoretical thinking
• Values — willingness to question received beliefs and traditions

A person can be high on Ideas and low on Aesthetics — the engineer who loves theoretical puzzles but does not care about museums. Or high on Aesthetics and low on Ideas — the visual artist who finds philosophy boring. The overall score blurs all of this. The facet pattern is where the texture lives.

What the score can predict

Across many studies, higher Openness is associated with:

• Choosing creative, research, or artistic careers
• Greater willingness to revise political and religious views over a lifetime ³
• Higher scores on tests of divergent thinking
• More frequent travel and lifestyle experimentation
• Faster adaptation to unfamiliar cultures

The effects are real but modest. Openness explains a slice of these outcomes, not all of them. A high score does not mean you are creative — it means you are more likely to seek out the situations where creativity tends to develop.

What it does not predict

This is where careful reading helps. Openness is often confused with:

Intelligence. They correlate, but the link is small to moderate. A high-Openness person is not necessarily smart, and a smart person is not necessarily high in Openness ⁴. The two traits run on different tracks.

Niceness. Openness has nothing to do with warmth or how kind a person tends to be. That is Agreeableness. Plenty of high-Openness people are sharp-edged. Plenty of low-Openness people are deeply kind.

Productivity. Openness and Conscientiousness are independent. A high-Openness, low-Conscientiousness person may have a thousand ideas and finish none. A high-Openness, high-Conscientiousness person tends to publish.

Liberal politics. Openness is correlated with liberal positions on social issues, but the link is one of tendency, not destiny. Plenty of high-Openness people hold conservative views, and plenty of low-Openness people hold liberal ones. The trait predicts a leaning, not a vote.

Common misreads

A few patterns trip people up when they see their Openness score.

"I scored low — am I close-minded?" Probably not. Low Openness means a preference for the tested over the novel. It does not mean rigidity. People low in Openness often build deep expertise in one area, follow through on what works, and avoid the cost of constantly chasing the new. That is a strength, not a flaw.

"I scored high — why am I not creative?" Openness raises the odds of creative output, but creative work also requires Conscientiousness to finish things and skill that takes years to build. A high Openness score is a starting condition, not a finished product.

"My score moved a lot since last time." Of the five traits, Openness tends to be one of the more stable across adulthood ⁵, but mood and recent experience can shift self-report scores a bit. A 5–10 percentile drift between tests is normal noise.

How high and low Openness feel from the inside

High Openness often looks like:

• A new project, hobby, or interest every few months
• Comfort sitting with abstract or hypothetical questions
• A pull toward art, music, or ideas with no obvious payoff
• Sometimes: trouble committing to one path

Low Openness often looks like:

• Strong preference for familiar food, places, routines
• Impatience with abstract or "what if" conversations
• A "show me it works" stance toward new tools or methods
• Sometimes: feeling left behind when the world changes fast

Neither is better. They are different defaults that work in different contexts.

How to read your own Openness score

Look at the overall first, then read the facet pattern. A 70th-percentile overall can hide:

• High Ideas + low Actions: you love theory but hate trying new restaurants
• High Aesthetics + low Values: you care about beauty but hold traditional beliefs
• High Fantasy + low Feelings: rich imagination, less awareness of your own moods

The facets often explain why a single number does not quite match your experience.

Take the free Big Five assessment → to see your six Openness facets, or view a sample report first →.

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