Openness to Experience: the O Factor in HEXACO

Emma has been standing in front of one painting for twenty minutes. James walked the entire exhibition in twelve and is waiting outside on a bench.

On the way home they argue, and not about art. She feels he never lets himself stop. He feels she is making a science out of something you can take in at a glance. Neither of them notices that they have just brushed against a personality trait psychologists have been measuring for several decades.

It is called openness to experience, and in the six-factor HEXACO model it carries the letter O. It says nothing about who is smarter or more cultured. It describes how strongly you are pulled towards the new, the unusual and the things that are not yet good for anything.

Four different things under one letter

The model was put together by the psychologists Kibeom Lee and Michael Ashton, out of analyses of how people in different languages describe other people's character. Alongside the five familiar dimensions, a sixth one emerged, honesty-humility, and the remaining factors rearranged themselves slightly underneath it. How all six differ from the Big Five is covered in a separate piece on the HEXACO model.

Openness is the hardest of the six to get hold of. Under a single name it keeps four inclinations that hang together far more loosely than you would expect.

The combinations tend to be uneven. A programmer who gets through three books on the history of Byzantium and yawns her way around a gallery has high inquisitiveness and low aesthetic appreciation. Someone who loves experimental music but cannot bear the slightest change to a procedure at work sits high on aesthetics and low on unconventionality. The average of those four numbers therefore says less about you than the shape of their spread.

What high O looks like in an ordinary week

You recognise it best by what a person does when nobody is watching. Ordered books pile up faster than they get read. Three half-finished hobbies lie next to each other. And at eleven at night it is entirely possible to sink into a documentary about deep-sea fish with a presentation waiting in the morning.

In conversation, openness shows up differently. It cares less about the conclusion than about where the conclusion came from, so it asks about things that seem to move the topic nowhere. It takes an idea it disagrees with seriously, because it wants to understand it from the inside first. And it can sit through a genuinely strange suggestion without smirking.

The bill arrives at the finishing stage. The routine part of the work, the part with nothing left to discover, gets pushed back to a later date and sometimes never comes round. High O also manufactures restlessness: what was exciting a year ago is dull today, and people change projects, fields or cities more often than their CV can comfortably absorb.

Openness is not intelligence

This is where the most common mistake comes in. High O reads easily as cleverness, because from the outside it looks similar: well read, plenty of references, willing to talk about abstractions. The measured link between openness and scores on tests of reasoning ability is nevertheless weak. It accounts for only a small fraction of what makes people differ.

Why the two get confused was shown by Colin DeYoung and his colleagues in 2007. Openness can be split in two: one half leans towards imagination, perception and art, the other towards facts, logic and thinking problems through. The second half is what the research literature calls intellect, and it overlaps with reasoning ability appreciably more. Anyone claiming that open people are smarter is usually talking about half the trait.

The difference between the halves is visible in how those people behave in a discussion. One asks whether the numbers are right. The other asks what if we are looking at the whole thing the wrong way. Neither question is the cleverer one, they simply point elsewhere.

One property of openness also runs against intuition. The tendency to look for connections does not stop at the real ones. People scoring high in openness more reliably find a pattern in a mess of data, and they also see one more often where none exists. The same filter that lets original ideas in lets nonsense in as well.

Low openness and its quiet advantage

Descriptions of a low score tend to be unfair. Words like narrow-minded or dull have no place in them, because the score measures something else: how much you trust the tested over the untested. Someone with low O wants to see that a thing works before letting it into their life.

Martin has run a warehouse for fifteen years and meets every innovation with the same question: what happens if it does not work out. When the company was rolling out a new stock system, he was the only person who asked the vendor for a list of customers who had been using it for a year. Two of them described a problem that later saved the company two months of work. His enthusiastic colleagues were never going to make those calls, because it did not occur to them.

In a setting where a mistake costs money or health, scepticism about the new comes out cheaper than the appetite to try it. Add one more advantage on top: expertise is built by repetition, not by hopping. Someone who is bored by doing the same thing for four years rarely gets very deep into it.

The weak spot of low O lies somewhere other than intelligence. What is missing is the warning that the world underneath the established procedure has moved on. That warning usually arrives at the point where the movement is already showing up in the numbers.

Openness and creative work

Of all the personality traits, openness sits closest to creativity. Gregory Feist summarised dozens of studies on the personality of creative people in 1998, and openness was among the things that most sharply set scientists and artists apart from their less creative colleagues. It makes sense: without an appetite for searching unusual options, an original solution has nowhere to come from.

More interesting, though, is that split into two halves. Scott Barry Kaufman and his colleagues found in 2016 that each half predicts something different. The one pulling towards imagination and aesthetics was linked to creative achievement in the arts. The more factual one, closer to logic and evidence, was linked to achievement in the sciences. One letter, two separate tracks.

An idea on its own, however, is not a finished thing. Chloe comes out of a single meeting with ten campaigns and three of them are worth having, yet without Ryan, who keeps the list and watches the deadlines, not one would reach the outside world. Openness supplies the material, conscientiousness pushes it out of the door. Creative teams that collapsed into nothing but enthusiasts did not usually fail from a shortage of ideas.

Hiring research, meanwhile, runs into an unexpected limit. Murray Barrick and Michael Mount summarised the data on personality and job performance in 1991, and openness barely qualified as a predictor of performance at all. It did predict reasonably well how someone would do while being trained. So openness tells you more about how quickly you will learn something than about how well you will then do it.

Creativity itself can also be measured directly, independently of character. You then ask about solutions to tasks rather than about how a person describes themselves; that is the direction taken by the creative thinking test, which is related to openness without measuring the same thing.

Why novelty is so hard to talk about

The difference in openness cuts deepest wherever something new is being decided. Changing suppliers, a different way of teaching, gutting a flat, an unusual family arrangement. From outside it looks like a dispute about facts, and inside it is about something else.

For a person with high O, novelty is an argument in itself. The fact that something has not been tried is the reason it is worth a try. For a person with low O, novelty is the reason to carry the burden of proof. Untried means unverified, and unverified means risk. Both are talking about the same thing, they just picture the opposite under the word "interesting".

A similar gap echoes through attitudes to public affairs. Research on political opinion repeatedly finds a mild link between openness and willingness to change established rules; the well-known review by John Jost and co-authors from 2003 arrived at the same conclusion. It is a weak tendency rather than a destiny, and it certainly does not settle who is right about any particular question.

When did you last change your mind about something you considered long since closed? The answer to that question gives away more about your O than a whole questionnaire. While you are at it, try to recall what actually moved you: a new piece of information, or the fact that it was brought to you by someone you trust.

The practical consequence is unshowy. If you are bringing something new to a person with low O, do not open with how new it is, open with where it is already running and what happens if it fails. If you are on the receiving end of something new and you know you do not fancy it, put a single question to the other side: what should convince me. When you cannot answer it yourself either, this is not an argument, it is comfort.

What to do with it

Openness is neither a virtue nor a flaw, which is fairly rare among personality traits. High O pays off in an environment that changes fast and rewards experiment. Low O pays off where reliability is prized and mistakes are expensive. What is mainly useful is knowing where on that scale you stand, because you can then choose your environments accordingly.

The trait also drifts slightly over time. A large meta-analysis by Brent Roberts and co-authors from 2006 described openness as usually rising a little in young adulthood and falling again later in life. The shifts are small, but they show we are not dealing with anything set in concrete.

Where exactly you lie is measured by the HEXACO test: 60 questions, roughly eight minutes, a result for all six factors including the breakdown of openness into its individual facets. The comparison with other people is approximate, but for telling "I love change" apart from "I can put up with change" it is more than enough.

You can also try it without a test. For a fortnight, write down every decision where you chose between a proven and a new option, and add one sentence of why to each. A restaurant, a tool, a cycling route, the way you settle a dispute at work. If that list says "because I know it" ten times over, you have your answer. If it says "because I do not know it yet" ten times over, you have it as well, just from the other side.