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Types / Personality traits / Openness

One of five traits · one of five

Openness

How readily your attention moves toward ideas, imagination, possibilities, and experiences that are not yet familiar.

This trait runs along one continuous scale, with everyone somewhere on it. Your Personality Type assessment places you along that range, and it is one of the four scales used to read your four-letter type.

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What Openness really is

Openness describes what kind of novelty and complexity tends to hold your attention. Higher scores often bring curiosity about ideas, imagination, aesthetics, unusual experiences, and questions that have not been settled. Lower scores often bring a preference for what is concrete, tested, familiar, and useful now. Neither approach is inherently more intelligent: one looks for possibilities, while the other protects contact with reality.

It is about the direction of your attention, not the amount of ability you have. You may enjoy ideas without being good at every kind of reasoning, or prefer practical methods while thinking deeply about the problems that matter to you. The revealing question is what you do when the familiar method stops working: do you explore alternatives first, or return to what has already proved reliable?

Higher and lower

These two cards offer everyday sketches, not a score. Everyone has a place on one continuous scale, and more people are near the middle than either end. You may recognize yourself at both ends in different situations, so read each description as a usual direction, not a permanent rule.

Lower OpennessS

People lower on this trait tend to ask what an idea changes in practice. They may prefer clear evidence, familiar methods, and decisions grounded in what can be observed rather than in what might someday be possible. A clever proposal that creates new problems will not impress them for long, and they do not need to reinvent dinner, a workflow, or a tradition simply to prove they can.

The strength here is continuity: while others chase the next new thing, they may keep a dependable process running and notice the practical details that novelty obscures. The cost is that useful alternatives can arrive wearing the clothes of inconvenience. A method that has worked before is not automatically the best method for a changed situation. Making room for small, low-risk experiments can preserve practicality without turning it into rigidity.

Higher OpennessN

Someone higher on this trait might look up one fact about octopuses and return two hours later with questions about nervous systems, intelligence, and what counts as a mind. They often enjoy ideas before there is an obvious use for them, notice connections between distant subjects, try unfamiliar experiences, and reopen questions other people have filed away. This can make them imaginative investigators: people who see a different route because they are willing to leave the marked one.

The cost of the same appetite is that the exciting phase can end long before the unglamorous phase does. A new possibility may receive more attention than the maintenance it displaced; a familiar answer may be rejected simply because it is familiar. Curiosity becomes more useful when it is paired with selection: deciding which questions deserve sustained effort, which experiments have a stopping point, and which proven routines are worth keeping.

In between In the middle, you may welcome a new idea when it solves a real problem, opens an interesting question, or improves on what already works. You can appreciate imagination without needing to live in possibility, and respect tradition without treating it as untouchable. Your openness may show up most clearly in certain domains—music, work, travel, relationships, or ideas—rather than everywhere at once.

The six parts of Openness

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The in-depth assessment splits Openness into six narrower parts. Someone can land high on one and low on another, and each card leads to a page about that part.

Its letter in the four-letter type

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SLowerNHigher

Openness gives the second letter of a four-letter type (think ISFJ). Higher Openness comes out as N, and lower comes out as S. The letter marks which side of the middle you landed on, not how far away you are. Two people can share a letter while having noticeably different scores—and someone close to the middle may reasonably recognize both sides.

Interest types it’s linked to

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Research on interests and personality found five strong overlaps between the five traits and Holland’s six interests[1]. Higher Openness is part of two of them, with Artistic and Investigative interests. People higher on this trait tend to be more drawn to this kind of work, while interests also grow from experience, opportunity, and what you have learned to value.

AArtisticOpen-ended work that makes room for self-expression, imagination, and original ideas.IInvestigativeObserving carefully, researching questions, and working through complex problems.

What research connects it to

  • Researchers have found that this trait contains at least two related strands: one involving imagination, aesthetic experience, and sensitivity to beauty, and another involving interest in ideas, patterns, and reasoning[2]. Two people with similar overall scores can therefore look quite different—one drawn toward art and experience, another toward abstract questions.
  • A review of 83 studies found Openness among the traits that most consistently distinguished creative achievers in both the arts and the sciences[3]. This tendency can help a person notice alternatives and tolerate uncertainty, but an original idea still needs knowledge, effort, judgment, and follow-through to become an achievement. Seeing possibilities is the beginning of creative work, not proof that an idea will survive contact with reality.
  • A large synthesis of research on personality traits and abilities found that the two overlap only modestly[4]. Enjoying ideas is not a measure of intelligence, and preferring practical matters is not evidence of limited ability. Curiosity and reasoning capacity can support each other, but they are not the same thing.

These are patterns found by comparing groups of people, not predictions about you. A trait may influence what you notice, prefer, or tend to do, but context, experience, values, and choice still matter. People with similar scores can live very different lives—and the same person can respond differently in different settings.

The other four traits

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Where do you fall on openness?

See your percentile on each of five personality traits, compared with 596,850 people.

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Questions

Why does Openness give the S or N letter?

When researchers compared four-letter codes with the five traits, the letter scales lined up with four of the five traits instead of sorting people into separate types[5]. Nomigram turns this trait’s percentile into one of the four letters by using the 50th percentile as the dividing line. Higher lands on one letter; lower lands on the other. A result within five percentile points of the middle is nearly a tie, so the letter should be read as a slight lean rather than a firm identity.

Where does this come from?

Each number in the text points to one of these studies.

  • 1 Larson, Rottinghaus & Borgen (2002), Journal of Vocational Behavior 61, 217-239
  • 2 DeYoung, Quilty & Peterson (2007), Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 93(5), 880-896 Link
  • 3 Feist (1998), Personality and Social Psychology Review 2(4), 290-309 Link
  • 4 Stanek & Ones (2023), Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Link
  • 5 McCrae & Costa (1989), Journal of Personality 57(1), 17-40 Link
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