Conceptions and Correlates of Openness to Experience

Abstract

This chapter discusses the openness which cannot be understood as the culture that is acquired through education or good breeding, not as intellect or any other cognitive ability. Openness must be viewed in both structural and motivational terms. Openness is seen in the breadth, depth, and permeability of consciousness and in the recurrent need to enlarge and examine experience. Openness also suggests a passive or uncritical receptivity, which is clearly inappropriate. Open people actively seek out experience and are apt to be particularly reflective and thoughtful about the ideas they encounter. A structural account of openness may be necessary, but it does not seem to be sufficient. Open people are not the passive recipients of a barrage of experiences they are unable to screen out; they actively seek out new and varied experiences. Openness involves motivation, needs for variety cognition sentience, and understanding. The heritability of openness might be explained by the heritability of intelligence. Psychologists have spent more time and effort studying intelligence, than any other trait by adopting the term “Intellect.” Personality psychologists could claim this vast literature as their own. Openness could be construed as intelligence itself or as the reflection of intelligence in the personality sphere.