Openness

What Openness actually measures

Openness is about the breadth and depth of your mental life: how readily you entertain an unfamiliar idea, how much you enjoy abstraction for its own sake, how vivid your imagination is, how much you notice and care about art, and how willing you are to revise a settled opinion.

The ten items MyTraitMap uses come from Goldberg’s Factor V marker scale, which he labelled Intellect or Imagination rather than Openness. That naming matters. This scale leans toward the intellectual and imaginative side of the trait and away from the aesthetic-and-values side the NEO inventories emphasise. Someone deeply moved by music but uninterested in abstract argument can score lower here than their own experience of themselves would suggest.

High and low, described fairly

Higher scores

Curious, imaginative, drawn to theory and metaphor, comfortable with ambiguity, quick to reframe a problem. Higher Openness is the trait most consistently associated with creative achievement across domains — though the association is modest, and creative output depends at least as much on Conscientiousness, opportunity and sheer practice.

The cost side is real: a strong pull toward the new can mean unfinished projects, restlessness with routine work that needs doing, and a taste for complexity where a simple answer would have served.

Lower scores

Practical, grounded, focused on what is concrete and proven. Lower Openness is not a lack of intelligence — the two are distinct, and the correlation between Openness and measured cognitive ability is real but weak. It describes preference rather than capacity: a preference for the tested over the theoretical, for depth in a known domain over breadth across new ones.

The strength side is equally real: consistency, patience with the ordinary, and resistance to being talked into a clever idea that will not work.

The six facets underneath

Broad traits are made of narrower ones. The facet structure most commonly used for Openness splits it into six, and people are frequently high on some and low on others:

• Imagination — how rich and active your inner world is.
• Artistic interests — how much you notice and are moved by art, music and beauty.
• Emotionality — how aware of and expressive about your own feelings you are.
• Adventurousness — appetite for new places, new activities, new routines.
• Intellect — enjoyment of argument, abstraction and puzzles.
• Liberalism — willingness to question authority, tradition and settled values.

A 50-item test collapses all six into one number. That is the honest trade you make for a five-minute test, and it is the main reason a single Openness score should be read as a starting point rather than a verdict.

What the research does and does not support

• Openness is the Big Five trait most reliably linked to creativity and to work that rewards generating ideas. The effects are consistent but modest.
• It tends to rise through adolescence and early adulthood and to decline gently in later life, on average.
• It shows a real but small association with more liberal social and political attitudes — a group-level tendency, not a prediction about any individual.
• It does not predict job performance in general the way Conscientiousness does, and it is not a substitute for a measure of ability.

What a openness score is not

• It is not a percentile. Your number is a rescaled average of your own ten answers, not a rank against a population. See reading your scores.
• It is not a type. There is no a practical group and a curious group; the middle of the range is where most people land.
• It is not a diagnosis, an aptitude measure, or a judgement. Neither end of this spectrum is the better end.
• It is not fixed. Traits shift slowly across adulthood, and a score taken in a bad week can read a few points off.

The ten questions that produce this score

MyTraitMap measures openness with the ten public-domain IPIP Big-Five Factor Marker items below. Reverse-keyed items are scored in the opposite direction, so agreeing with one of those lowers the score.

1. 01Have a rich vocabulary.
2. 02Have difficulty understanding abstract ideas.reverse-keyed
3. 03Have a vivid imagination.
4. 04Am not interested in abstract ideas.reverse-keyed
5. 05Have excellent ideas.
6. 06Do not have a good imagination.reverse-keyed
7. 07Am quick to understand things.
8. 08Use difficult words.
9. 09Spend time reflecting on things.
10. 10Am full of ideas.

Every item is listed here deliberately. A test you can read in full before you take it is a test you can judge for yourself. The scoring arithmetic is on the methodology page.