Openness to experience: the six facets inside one Big Five trait

Two people can get the same high openness score in a Big Five test and still have little in common. One spends weekends at concerts and galleries and cries at films. The other reads about physics for fun, avoids museums and orders the same meal every time. A single openness score hides that difference.

Openness to experience is the Big Five trait that describes how much you seek out and enjoy new ideas, sensations and ways of seeing things. The post on what the Big Five says about you covers all five traits. This one looks inside one of them.

Six facets

In 1992 Paul Costa and Robert McCrae published the NEO PI-R, a long personality questionnaire that splits each Big Five trait into six narrower facets. For openness they are:

• Fantasy, an active imagination and a rich inner life
• Aesthetics, being moved by art, music, poetry and beauty in general
• Feelings, noticing your own emotions and taking them seriously
• Actions, a taste for new activities, places and foods
• Ideas, intellectual curiosity and pleasure in abstract problems
• Values, readiness to question tradition, authority and fixed moral rules

Our Openness to Experience test uses the same six facets, with three statements each. We wrote the 18 statements ourselves following this structure, so it is a self-reflection tool, not a validated questionnaire. You rate each statement on a five-point scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree and get a score for each facet.

Examples: "My daydreams and mental images are vivid and detailed" (Fantasy), "Music, art, or literature move me deeply" (Aesthetics), "I like to consider ideas that challenge what I already believe" (Ideas). Three statements are scored in reverse, so agreeing with them lowers your score. One belongs to Actions: "I prefer sticking to tried-and-tested habits rather than experimenting with something new." The other two belong to Values.

Two halves of one trait

In 2007 Colin DeYoung, Lena Quilty and Jordan Peterson analysed many facet scales and found that each Big Five trait splits into two broader aspects. For this trait they called them Openness, the side of imagination, art and perception, and Intellect, the side of ideas and abstract thinking. That explains the two people from the beginning. The concert-goer is high on the first aspect, the physics reader on the second.

The Values facet sits somewhat apart from both. In 1996 Robert McCrae reviewed links between openness and social attitudes and found that more open people tend to hold more liberal political and moral views, while less open people tend to favour tradition and convention. A low Values score describes someone who trusts tested rules and is wary of change for its own sake.

A shiver as a marker

One sign of openness is physical. The NEO PI-R includes a statement about feeling a chill or a wave of excitement while reading poetry or looking at art. In 2007 McCrae examined that statement in data from many cultures and found it was one of the clearest single markers of openness.

Reading your profile

Look at the spread across the six facets before the total. An uneven profile is normal. High Ideas with low Aesthetics, or high Feelings with low Actions, is an ordinary result.

High openness is not automatically better. In a 1998 review Gregory Feist found that creative scientists and artists scored higher on openness than their less creative peers, which fits creative work. Low openness has its own uses, such as steady routines and loyalty to what already works. Three statements per facet also give only a rough picture, so treat one-point differences between facets lightly.

For all five traits, take the Big Five test, or the TIPI if you have a minute, and read what the ten TIPI questions give up for speed. The Ideas facet overlaps with curiosity, which the curiosity scale measures in more detail.