Openness to Experience is the personality dimension measuring intellectual curiosity, aesthetic sensitivity, imagination, and a preference for novelty — it is the strongest personality predictor of creative achievement and political liberalism, and also the trait associated with a particular kind of loneliness that comes from seeing the world differently from most people.
That final element — the loneliness thread — is rarely the first thing mentioned in a personality science article. It tends to come out in conversation, when people high on this dimension describe what it is like to experience things intensely that others seem not to notice, to find themselves drawn into the texture of a piece of music or the structure of an idea while others have moved on. The research literature on openness is largely a literature about its associations with creativity, cognition, and political orientation. But the lived experience of high openness includes something the statistics do not fully capture: the particular quality of inhabiting the world with a different level of depth and a different frequency from most people around you.
This article covers both sides — what the research shows about openness and what it means experientially to carry this trait at high or low levels.
Key Takeaways
- Openness to Experience is the Big Five trait most strongly associated with creative achievement, artistic production, and political liberalism across multiple studies and populations.
- The trait has six facets: fantasy, aesthetics, feelings, actions, ideas, and values — each measuring a different expression of openness to novelty and depth.
- Research by DeYoung et al. (2012) identified two meaningful sub-dimensions within openness: Openness proper (aesthetic, imaginative, sensory) and Intellect (abstract reasoning, ideas, analytical engagement) — which load on different neural systems.
- Feist (1998) established in a meta-analysis that openness is the most consistent personality predictor of creative achievement across artistic and scientific domains.
- High openness is associated with a specific kind of social isolation — not from introversion, but from experiencing a depth and texture in the world that is difficult to share and rarely mirrored.
- Low openness is not anti-intellectualism — it represents a conventional, grounded, practical orientation with genuine adaptive strengths in consistency-demanding, rule-governed environments.
What Openness to Experience Actually Measures
Openness to Experience sits at the end of a dimension anchored at the low end by a conventional, practical, and routine-preferring orientation and at the high end by a curious, imaginative, and novelty-seeking one. McCrae and Costa (1997) defined it as "the breadth, depth, and permeability of consciousness" — the degree to which a person's experience is rich, varied, and permeable to new ideas and sensations.
This is a somewhat unusual way to define a personality trait, and it captures something important. Most personality dimensions describe what a person tends to do. Openness describes something more like how much of the world a person takes in — how much of what is available to perception, imagination, and thought actually registers and engages them.
People high in openness report richer perceptual experiences. They notice things others miss — the quality of light in a room, the subtext in a piece of writing, the pattern in an argument. They are more likely to find unexpected connections between unrelated domains. They are more likely to be genuinely captured by ideas for their own sake, independent of their practical utility. They are more likely to have aesthetic responses to things — to be moved by music, disturbed by visual dissonance, or compelled by the structure of a mathematical proof.
People low in openness are not failing to notice these things — they are calibrated differently. Their attention tends toward the practical, the concrete, and the established. They prefer proven methods to novel ones. They are more comfortable with convention and more skeptical of the unfamiliar. These are not deficits. In many contexts — particularly those requiring consistency, procedural adherence, and reliability — this calibration is exactly right.
The Six Facets of Openness
Like the other Big Five dimensions, openness is composed of multiple distinguishable facets that capture different aspects of the underlying dimension.
Fantasy measures the tendency to have a vivid imagination and to engage in daydreaming, fantasy, and imaginative play. People high on this facet create elaborate mental worlds and spend meaningful time in them. This is not mere escapism — in highly open individuals, fantasy is often generative, producing ideas, narratives, and connections that later appear in creative work.
Aesthetics measures responsiveness to beauty in art, music, poetry, and nature. People high on this facet have strong aesthetic responses — they are moved, affected, or captivated by aesthetic objects in ways that others may find disproportionate. This facet is closely tied to artistic and musical engagement.
Feelings measures the tendency to be emotionally responsive and to value emotional experience as important in its own right. High scorers on this facet are tuned in to the emotional texture of their experience and that of others. This is one of the pathways through which openness connects to empathy.
Actions measures a preference for novelty and variety in daily life — trying new foods, taking different routes, exploring unfamiliar activities. This is the behavioral expression of openness: a positive orientation toward the new for its own sake.
Ideas measures intellectual curiosity and the enjoyment of abstract reasoning, philosophical discussion, and conceptual exploration. This is the facet most associated with what people colloquially call intellectual curiosity — the intrinsic pleasure of working through hard ideas.
Values measures openness to re-examining one's own beliefs, values, and principles. High scorers on this facet are more willing to question their assumptions, update their beliefs, and tolerate moral complexity. This facet is a key pathway through which openness connects to political liberalism.
What Openness Predicts: Creativity, Art, and Political Orientation
The three most robust predictions of openness are creative achievement, artistic engagement, and political liberalism. Each has a substantial research base.
Creative achievement. Feist (1998) conducted a meta-analysis comparing personality profiles of creative versus non-creative individuals across artistic and scientific domains and found that openness was the most consistent differentiator. Creative people — artists, writers, scientists, musicians — score higher on openness than comparison populations with remarkable consistency. The prediction holds within domain (more creative artists score higher than less creative artists) and across domain (artists and scientists share high openness despite very different personalities in other respects).
The mechanism is likely multi-pathway. Openness facilitates divergent thinking — the ability to generate multiple possible answers to a question. It supports the kind of associative thinking that produces novel connections between distant ideas. It sustains engagement with difficult, ambiguous, unresolved problems longer than most people can tolerate. And it produces the intrinsic motivation — the pull toward exploring ideas for their own sake — that drives the sustained investment that creative achievement requires.
Artistic engagement. Independent of professional creative achievement, openness predicts engagement with the arts as a consumer and participant. High-openness individuals are more likely to play musical instruments, write creatively, attend cultural events, and find aesthetic experience genuinely meaningful. This is consistent with the aesthetics and fantasy facets, but it extends beyond those facets to the full dimension.
Political liberalism. The relationship between openness and political orientation is one of the most replicated findings in political psychology. Openness predicts liberal political orientation across multiple countries and measurement approaches. The mechanism is understood to run through the values facet — the willingness to question established conventions and moral frameworks — and through the tolerance for ambiguity and complexity that characterizes both high openness and liberal political thought. Kaufman (2013) and others have extended this to show that openness also predicts specific liberal policy positions rather than just general orientation.
Two Dimensions Within Openness: Aesthetic and Intellectual
One of the most important refinements of the openness construct came from DeYoung, Quilty, Peterson, and Gray (2012), who used factor analysis to show that openness is not a single homogeneous dimension but contains two meaningfully distinct sub-dimensions.
Openness (sometimes labeled aesthetic openness) encompasses the fantasy, aesthetics, and feelings facets — the perceptual, imaginative, and sensory aspects of openness. This sub-dimension is associated with sensory richness, aesthetic sensitivity, and emotional depth of experience. People high on this sub-dimension are deeply moved by art, highly imaginative, and emotionally responsive.
Intellect encompasses the ideas facet and related items — the abstract, analytical, and conceptual aspects of openness. This sub-dimension is associated with engagement with ideas, enjoyment of complex reasoning, and intrinsic motivation for intellectual activity. People high on this sub-dimension are drawn to philosophy, mathematics, complex arguments, and systems thinking.
These two sub-dimensions are correlated but dissociable. DeYoung et al. (2012) showed they have different neural correlates — Openness links more strongly to sensory and perceptual processing systems, while Intellect links more strongly to working memory and abstract reasoning systems. A person can be high on one and not particularly high on the other — a highly aesthetic artist with little interest in abstract conceptual work, or a highly analytical scientist with relatively conventional sensory preferences.
This distinction matters practically. When people say they are "not creative," they are often accurately identifying low aesthetic openness while having quite high intellectual openness — or vice versa. The two facets of openness require different environments, different forms of expression, and different kinds of recognition.
The Loneliness of High Openness
This element of the openness experience is not well represented in the research literature, but it is consistent enough in the subjective reports of high-openness people to deserve direct treatment.
High openness means experiencing the world with a particular depth and intensity. Music is not background — it is an event. A well-constructed argument is not just correct — it is beautiful. A piece of writing that captures something true is not merely interesting — it is moving. Ideas are not just useful — they are intrinsically compelling.
The problem is that this depth of experience is not evenly distributed across people. Most people experience most things at a different register. The highly open person who wants to discuss the structural tension in a film, the philosophical implications of a news story, or the emotional truth in a piece of music will often find that others are ready to move on before they have started. This is not the loneliness of introversion — high-openness people can be quite extraverted. It is the loneliness of a particular kind of depth that is rarely met.
This experience creates a specific pattern in the social lives of highly open people: a persistent search for others who experience the world at a similar depth, and a particular quality of relief and aliveness when that connection is found. It also creates a susceptibility to isolation in environments that are predominantly conventional — workplaces, communities, or families where aesthetic sensitivity, intellectual exploration, and complexity-seeking are not valued or understood.
The research does not give this phenomenon a clean name. But it is real, it is distinctive to this trait, and it shapes the relational and occupational choices of high-openness people in ways that are worth understanding directly.
Low Openness: Conventional, Grounded, Practical
Low openness is consistently undervalued in cultures that prize novelty, creativity, and intellectual exploration. The low-openness person is often characterized — inaccurately — as closed-minded, incurious, or intellectually limited.
This framing is wrong in several respects. Low openness is a preference for the established, the concrete, and the practical — not an inability to engage with the novel. People low in openness prefer conventional approaches because they trust what works. They prefer concrete goals because abstraction without application feels unmoored. They prefer established methods because innovation carries risk that often outweighs its benefits.
These preferences have genuine strengths in the right environments. Work that requires consistent application of established procedures, reliability in executing defined processes, and stability in complex systems is often better performed by people with lower openness. The highly open surgeon who is always wondering if there might be a better technique is not necessarily better than the reliable surgeon who executes the standard procedure with consistent excellence. The low-openness accountant who follows established protocols without feeling the constant pull toward creative alternatives is not a lesser professional — they are often precisely the right professional.
Low openness also predicts contentment in conventional life paths. People low in openness are less likely to experience the kind of existential restlessness that characterizes high-openness people who feel pulled to explore possibilities they cannot articulate. They are more likely to find their lives satisfying as structured, predictable, and embedded in community and tradition. This is not settling — it is alignment between one's nature and one's choices.
Can Openness Be Developed?
Openness is moderately heritable and tends to be relatively stable across adulthood. But there is meaningful evidence that specific aspects of openness-related behavior can be cultivated, even if the underlying trait does not fundamentally change.
Kaufman (2013), reviewing the curiosity literature, argued that while trait-level openness is relatively stable, the behaviors associated with openness — curiosity cultivation, aesthetic engagement, intellectual exploration — can be deliberately developed through practice and exposure. People who systematically expose themselves to novel experiences, learn to sit with uncertainty, and practice engaging with ideas outside their comfort zone tend to develop broader repertoires of engagement even if their core trait level does not shift dramatically.
Oleynick et al. (2017) examined the mechanisms through which openness produces creative output and found that the pathway involves specific cognitive habits — broad associative thinking, tolerance for ambiguity, suspension of premature closure — that can be practiced. Creative training programs that teach these habits can produce behavioral change that mimics higher openness, even without changing the underlying trait.
The more significant developmental finding may be this: people who are high in openness often need permission and environment more than development. Many high-openness people are operating in contexts that suppress, ignore, or pathologize their trait profile — treating their depth of engagement as distraction, their aesthetic sensitivity as impracticality, their curiosity as a problem to manage. For these people, the relevant intervention is not developing openness they already have. It is removing the friction that has been preventing them from expressing what was always there.
Take the InnerPersona Assessment
Openness is one of five Big Five dimensions measured by InnerPersona — but understanding it fully means knowing how it interacts with your other traits, your values, and your environment. InnerPersona measures 13 dimensions of personality and generates a report that goes deeper than trait scores: it explains the full texture of your profile and what it means for how you work, connect, and find meaning. Take the InnerPersona assessment and see where you sit on each dimension.
Read next: Conscientiousness: The Personality Trait Most Linked to Success and Burnout
Frequently Asked Questions
Is high openness the same as being intelligent?
No — openness and measured cognitive ability are correlated but distinct. High openness predicts engagement with ideas, curiosity, and intellectual investment; it does not predict raw reasoning capacity. The Intellect sub-dimension of openness (DeYoung et al., 2012) is associated with working memory and abstract reasoning, which overlaps with some measures of intelligence, but the two are different constructs. Many highly intelligent people score low in openness; many highly open people have average measured intelligence. The trait predicts the motivation and orientation toward intellectual engagement, not the ceiling of cognitive performance.
Why do high-openness people often feel misunderstood?
High openness involves experiencing the world with a particular depth and intensity — in aesthetic, emotional, and intellectual dimensions — that is not evenly distributed across people. The highly open person's level of engagement with ideas, art, and meaning is often calibrated differently from most of the people around them, which creates a persistent mismatch between the depth they want from conversations and experiences and the depth that is available. This is not neurosis or arrogance — it is a genuine trait-level difference in how much of the world registers as interesting, beautiful, or worth exploring.
What careers suit people with high openness?
High-openness people tend to thrive in careers that reward curiosity, creative problem-solving, and engagement with novelty and complexity: the arts, research, writing, design, teaching, philosophy, psychology, entrepreneurship, and innovation-focused work in any field. The key environmental conditions are autonomy, the freedom to explore, and contexts that treat questions and exploration as valuable rather than as distraction. High-openness people in highly structured, procedurally rigid environments tend to experience significant friction — not because they cannot perform the work, but because the environment suppresses the trait expression that makes their engagement sustainable.
What is the relationship between openness and the two sub-dimensions identified by researchers?
DeYoung et al. (2012) found that openness contains two distinct sub-dimensions: Openness (aesthetic openness — encompassing sensitivity to beauty, imagination, and emotional richness) and Intellect (abstract openness — encompassing engagement with ideas, conceptual complexity, and analytical curiosity). These sub-dimensions are correlated but load on different neural and cognitive systems. A person can be high in one and relatively low in the other — a sensory and aesthetically rich person with conventional intellectual interests, or a highly analytical thinker with relatively conventional aesthetic preferences.
Can low openness be a strength?
Yes. Low openness reflects a practical, conventional, and grounded orientation that is genuinely adaptive in many contexts. People low in openness excel in roles that require consistent execution of established procedures, reliability in complex systems, and resistance to the distraction of constant novelty. They tend to be more content with conventional life structures and less prone to the existential restlessness that can afflict highly open people. In environments where consistency, stability, and procedural excellence are what is needed, low openness is not a deficit — it is fit.
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