Big Five personality trait
Openness to experience: what high and low scores mean
The short answer: openness to experience describes how much you are drawn to new ideas, art, imagination and unfamiliar experiences, compared with the familiar and the practical. It is one of the five broad traits of the Big Five model of personality, sometimes remembered as OCEAN.
What openness measures
Openness covers several related tendencies: an active imagination, an interest in art and beauty, awareness of your own feelings, a taste for variety, and enjoyment of abstract ideas. People who score high on one of these tend to score high on the others, which is why they are grouped into one trait.
It is not the same as intelligence, and it is not about being "open-minded" in a political sense. It is about what you find interesting and how much novelty you seek.
High openness: what it looks like
People who score high on openness tend to:
- enjoy abstract conversations about ideas, meaning and "what if"
- seek out new food, travel, music and books
- notice and care about design, art and atmosphere
- get bored by routine and like to change how they do things
- question traditions rather than follow them by default
Low openness: what it looks like
People who score low on openness tend to:
- prefer the familiar: the same restaurant, the trusted route, the known method
- value practical, concrete thinking over theory
- respect tradition and what has worked before
- like clear answers more than open questions
- stay focused instead of chasing every new idea
In the middle
Most people score somewhere in the middle. That usually means openness depends on the area: adventurous with food but conservative with money, or curious about ideas at work but happy with the same vacation every year.
Openness in everyday life
At work, high openness suits roles with variety, ideas and change, such as design, research, strategy or writing. Lower openness suits roles that reward reliability and proven methods, and people lower on this trait are often the ones who keep a team grounded when everyone else is excited about the latest idea.
In relationships, a big gap in openness can show up in small ways: one partner wants to try the new place, the other wants the usual. Neither is wrong; it helps to know it is a difference in temperament rather than stubbornness or restlessness.
Is a high score better?
No. Each end has its advantages and its costs. High openness brings creativity and adaptability, but can mean restlessness and unfinished projects. Low openness brings focus, consistency and common sense, but can make change feel harder. The Big Five describes how you tend to be, not how you should be.
Where do you stand?
Ask yourself:
- Given a free weekend, would you rather try something new or do something you know you enjoy?
- Do you enjoy talking about ideas with no practical use?
- Do you find routine comforting, or confining?
Your answers give a hint, but scores are relative: what matters is where you stand compared with other people.
Find out where you stand with the free test
Where this comes from
The Big Five model grew out of decades of research into the words people use to describe each other, with major contributions from psychologists Lewis Goldberg, Paul Costa and Robert McCrae. It is the most widely used model of personality in research today. Happy Me's assessment uses public-domain questions from the International Personality Item Pool. It is for education and self-reflection, not a psychological diagnosis.