People with high openness are more open to experiences love art and music
Summary
- People with high openness are more open to experiences love art and music
Details
- Seek out novelty in books, art, movies and activities
- interested in things difficult to understand
- senstive to awe-inspiring
- linked to creativity
References
Quotes
People who are open to experiences love art and music, and they tend to be politically liberal, “spiritual but not religious,” and sexually adventurous. They have dreams they can more easily recall. They seek out novelty in books, art, movies, and activities, and when viewing a painting or listening to music, they have more tolerance for “disfluency,” the scientific term for something that’s difficult to understand. They’ll venture off to some obscure wing of the Louvre while everyone else waits in line for the Mona Lisa. Open people can be “sensation seekers,” craving new adventures and thrills. They spend lots of time on the Internet but relatively little time watching TV.
Open people are keenly sensitive to the marvelous and the awe-inspiring. One sign you might be open is if, when you see or hear something especially magnificent, the hairs on the back of your neck stand up and shivers go down your spine. The trait is usually measured by asking people, among other things, whether they like to engage with abstract ideas and in philosophical discussions, and whether they enjoy poetry and plays. Of all the traits, openness is most closely linked to creativity, and it also seems to correlate with verbal, but not mathematical, intelligence. If you have ever taken a class from a yoga instructor wearing bohemian culottes, smelling of natural deodorant, and recounting her recent psilocybin retreat, you have stared openness to experience in the face, and she has smiled back and said, “Do you want to come to the sound bath later?”
High openness predicts involvement with the arts, but also involvement with psychiatrists.
As the personality psychologist Robert McCrae put it, “Open people are bored by the predictable and intellectually undemanding amusements of closed people; closed people are bored by what they perceive to be the difficult and pretentious culture of the open.” Open people always want to try new things—with other open people.