Openness to Experience and Development of Adult Identity

ABSTRACT The formation of ego identity through exploration of alternatives and formation of commitments is a central issue in the transition from adolescence to adulthood (Erikson, 1959, Waterman, 1982) In 59 adults ranging in age from 18 to 30, independent identity scales were found to be positively correlated with age The construct of openness to experience was hypothesized to account for individual differences in identity development As predicted, openness to experience was positively correlated with ratings of current and past identity exploration, and negatively related to intensity of identity commitment A comparison of two methods of measuring ego identity showed that identity rating scales provide a more differentiated assessment of psychosocial development than does the identity status scoring method     

Openness to Experience,Intellect, and Cognitive Ability

An instrument designed to separate 2 midlevel traits within each of the Big Five (the Big Five Aspect Scales [BFAS]) was used to clarify the relation of personality to cognitive ability. The BFAS measures Openness to Experience and Intellect as separate (although related) traits, and refers to the broader Big Five trait as Openness/Intellect. In 2 samples (N = 125 and 189), Intellect was independently associated with general intelligence (g) and with verbal and nonverbal intelligence about equally. Openness was independently associated only with verbal intelligence. Implications of these findings are discussed for the empirical and conceptual relations of intelligence to personality and for the mechanisms potentially underlying both Openness/Intellect and cognitive ability.     

Openness to Experience,Ethical Leadership,and Innovative Work Behavior

Drawing on trait activation theory, we examine ethical leadership as a boundary condition on the relationship between openness to experience and innovative work behavior. We collected data from 291 subordinates and 51 supervisors to test our theoretical model. Our results suggest that openness to experience was positively related to innovative work behavior. Furthermore, this relationship was only significant when ethical leadership was perceived high as compared to low. Our research contributes to the literatures on innovative work behavior and ethical leadership.     

Remotely Close Associations: Openness to Experience and Semantic Memory Structure

Openness to experience—the enjoyment of novel experiences and ideas—has many connections to cognitive processes. People high in openness to experience, for example, tend to be more creative and have broader general knowledge than people low in openness to experience. In the current study, we use a network science approach to examine if the organization of semantic memory differs between high and low groups of openness to experience. A sample of 516 adults completed measures of openness to experience (from the NEO Five‐Factor Inventory‐3 and Big Five Aspect Scales) and a semantic verbal fluency task. Next, the sample was split into half to form high (n = 258) and low (n = 258) openness to experience groups. Semantic networks were then constructed on the basis of their verbal fluency responses. Our results revealed that the high openness to experience group's network was more interconnected, flexible, and had better local organization of associations than the low openness to experience group. We also found that the high openness to experience group generated more responses on average and provided more unique responses than the low openness to experience group. Taken together, our results indicate that openness to experience is related to semantic memory structure. © 2018 European Association of Personality Psychology     

The Influence of Openness to Experience and Organizational Justice on Creativity

Creative performance is a desired organizational outcome that can be influenced by individual differences and contextual factors. An empirical investigation was conducted to study perceptions of organizational justice, an important situational variable, and its influence on individual creative performance. Literature suggests that organizations look to hire individuals who have individual differences that make them more inclined to produce creative outputs; thus, this investigation also sought to determine how openness to experience, a construct known to have a positive relationship with creative performance, might interact with justice perceptions. This investigation uncovered a main effect relationship between procedural justice and creativity, as well as provided evidence that openness to experience moderates the relationship between distributive justice and creativity.     

Aesthetic Chills as a Universal Marker of Openness to Experience

Aesthetic chills are transient emotional responses to music or other experiences of beauty. Item 188 of the Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R) asks respondents if they have experienced these chills, and in American samples it is one of the best definers of Openness to Experience, one of the five basic personality factors. As part of the NEO-PI-R, the item has been translated into over 40 languages, and an examination of back-translations suggests that the phenomenon can be expressed in all the languages examined. Data from the Personality Profiles of Cultures Project show that Item 188 is one of the best definers of Openness in most of the 51 cultures examined. Aesthetic chills appear to be a universal emotional experience, although the functions they serve and the mechanisms that account for them remain to be discovered.

Interactive Effects of Multicultural Experiences and Openness to Experience on Creative Potential

Extensiveness of multicultural experiences and Openness to Experience were used to predict European American undergraduates' performance on two measures of creative potential: (a) generation of unusual uses of garbage bags and (b) retrieval of nonprototypical or normatively inaccessible exemplars in the conceptual domain of occupation. The results showed that having extensive multicultural experiences predicted better performance on both measures of creative potential only among participants who were open to experience. Among those who were not open, having more extensive multicultural experiences was associated with a lower level of creative potential. Implications of these findings for promoting creativity in schools are discussed.     

Openness to Experience and regulatory focus: Evidence of motivation from fit

Regulatory fit occurs when one’s strategies of goal pursuit sustain one’s interests in an activity, which can enhance motivation [e.g., Higgins, E. T. (2005). Value from regulatory fit. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 14, 209–213]. Because the strategic inclinations of people high (low) in Openness are similar to those of people in a promotion (prevention) focus, regulatory fit should be possible. We found that people higher in Openness were more motivated to pursue promotion-related goals (hopes/aspirations in Study 1 and a gain-framed goal in Study 2) and less motivated to pursue prevention-related goals (duties/obligations in Study 1 and a loss-framed goal in Study 2). We discuss how other traits might relate to motivation to pursue promotion- and prevention-related goals as well as other future research directions for regulatory focus and Openness.     

Introducing the Special Section on Openness to Experience: Review of Openness Taxonomies,Measurement, and Nomological Net

In this introduction to the Special Section on Openness to Experience, we review the historical background of the construct and its measurement. We also provide a meta-analytically based review of its broader nomological net. Specifically, we review relationships with other individual differences constructs, including personality traits, interests, and cognitive ability. We highlight the various roles that openness and intellect play in educational performance, occupational attitudes and behaviors, job performance, career success, and psychological health and well-being. In doing so, we emphasize the unique contributions of the articles published in this special section (Albrecht, Dilchert, Deller, & Paulus; Connelly, Ones, Davies, & Birkland; DeYoung, Quilty, Peterson, & Gray; Roets, Cornelis, & Van Hiel; Woo, Chernyshenko, Longley, Zhang, Chiu, & Stark; Woo, Chernyshenko, Stark, & Conz). Finally, we note fruitful venues for future research involving Openness constructs.     

Towards learning agents with personality traits: Modeling Openness to Experience

Recent advances in neurosciences and cognitive sciences show us that the human neocortex is not a slave to the experiences from our perception and that the memories stored in hippocampus are goal weighted during the replay of the experiences for the purpose of re-learning from them. Temporal difference reinforcement learning systems that use neural networks as function approximators rely on an experience replay memory structure similar to the hippocampus. We bring forward this similarity and present a novel way of using a goal weighted prioritization of the memory that is biologically inspired. Furthermore, we introduce a novel prioritization criteria called Variety of Experience Index, or VEI, for weighting the selection of the experiences that are stored in the replay memory. Weighting the experiences based on two different extremes of VEI can behaviourally modify the agent’s learning process, generating different types of learning agents that exhibit different personality traits along the dimension of Openness to Experience.     

Openness to Experience and Intellect Differentially Predict Creative Achievement in the Arts and Sciences

The Big Five personality dimension Openness/Intellect is the trait most closely associated with creativity and creative achievement. Little is known, however, regarding the discriminant validity of its two aspects—Openness to Experience (reflecting cognitive engagement with perception, fantasy, aesthetics, and emotions) and Intellect (reflecting cognitive engagement with abstract and semantic information, primarily through reasoning)—in relation to creativity. In four demographically diverse samples totaling 1,035 participants, we investigated the independent predictive validity of Openness and Intellect by assessing the relations among cognitive ability, divergent thinking, personality, and creative achievement across the arts and sciences. We confirmed the hypothesis that whereas Openness predicts creative achievement in the arts, Intellect predicts creative achievement in the sciences. Inclusion of performance measures of general cognitive ability and divergent thinking indicated that the relation of Intellect to scientific creativity may be due at least in part to these abilities. Lastly, we found that Extraversion additionally predicted creative achievement in the arts, independently of Openness. Results are discussed in the context of dual‐process theory.     

Openness to Experience and Team Creativity: Effects of Knowledge Sharing and Transformational Leadership

This study extends the research on the creative work process in teams by integrating personality traits, knowledge-sharing behavior, and transformational leadership. Analyses of multisource data from 347 members of 53 creative teams in 26 firms reveal the associations between heterogeneity of openness to experience in teams and team creativity (i.e., idea generation and idea development). Further, knowledge sharing mediated the relationships between personality heterogeneity and team creativity. Transformational leadership amplified the relationship between personality heterogeneity and idea development. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.     

Why Openness to Experience is not a Good Predictor of Job Performance

Recent meta‐analyses investigating the relationship between personality and job performance have found that openness to experience is the least predictive of the Big Five factors. Unlike other research that has sought to explain the low criterion‐validity with relation to job performance, this study explores the actual construct of openness to experience, suggesting that it consists of two dimensions that relate differentially to job performance thus reducing correlations between overall measures of openness to experience and performance criteria. Exploratory factor analysis of the six sub‐dimensions, or facets, of the NEO PI‐R (a popular measure of the Big Five factors) produced two factors of openness to experience corresponding to different areas to which people are open. A confirmatory factor analysis on a second set of data provided some support for this result. A pattern of differential relationships between the two factors and other variables including personality, biodata and supervisor‐rated performance offered further support for the multidimensionality of openness to experience. The implications of these findings for future research in the selection context are discussed.     

Openness to Experience and Growth Need Strength as Moderators between Job Characteristics and Satisfaction

This study examines a specific personality variable Growth Need Strength (GNS) and a general Big Five Personality Factor Openness to Experience as moderators between job characteristics and job satisfaction. Respondents were 95 graduate students working in part‐time jobs. They filled out Goldberg’s (1992) bi‐polar rating scale measuring the Big Five factors and Hackman and Oldham’s (1976) Job Diagnostic Survey. Results show that GNS and openness to experience are substantially related. Further, from hierarchical regression analyses, it appeared that the moderating effect of GNS on the relation between skill variety and job satisfaction was explained by the moderating effect of openness to experience. Practical implications for the use of openness to experience and other Big Five personality factors versus specific characteristics in selection and career counselling are discussed.     

Openness to Experience: Its Lower Level Structure,Measurement, and Cross-Cultural Equivalence

Openness to Experience is an important but relatively poorly understood personality construct. Advances in openness research require further construct clarification as well as establishment of a common framework for conceptualizing and measuring the lower level structure of the construct. In this article, we present data from 3 studies to address this research need. In Study 1, we identify 6 facets of Openness to Experience—intellectual efficiency, ingenuity, curiosity, aesthetics, tolerance, and depth—based on a factor analysis of 36 existing Openness-related scales. In Study 2, we present further validity evidence for the 6-facet structure based on a newly developed measure of Openness. Data from this study also suggest the presence of 2 intermediate-level factors (i.e., aspects) of Openness: intellect and culture. In Study 3, we present a short form of the newly developed measure, retaining items that showed the highest internal consistency and measurement invariance across 3 samples: U.S. undergraduates, Chinese MBA students, and Chinese undergraduates. Together these 3 studies offer a more nuanced understanding of the multifaceted nature of the Openness construct.     

Personality and Campus Controversies: Preferred Boundaries as a Function of Openness to Experience

We explored the relationship between the “big five” personality factors of the Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness–Personality Inventory (NEO-PI; Costa & McCrae, 1985) and students' endorsement of two locally controversial activities—a Halloween street festival and the university's intercollegiate football program. Consistent with opponents' views of the kinds of students who take part in the Halloween street party, those who favored this activity scored low on agreeableness but high on openness to experience. Those who favored continuance of the football program scored low on openness. Results are discussed in terms of preferences for boundaries and structure within environments. The results add to the construct validity of the NEO–PI and to understanding of the openness construct.     

Explicating the Openness to Experience Construct and its Subdimensions and Facets in a Work Setting

Recent meta‐analyses (e.g. Barrick, Mount, & Judge, 2001 ) found openness to experience, a factor in the five‐factor model of personality, to be uncorrelated with job performance. We argue that, among others, insignificant validity is due to the broad and heterogeneous nature of the construct. In line with our hypotheses, we found internal structure of openness to be multidimensional. Further analyses on subdimensional and facet level revealed large differences in criterion‐ and construct‐related validity. It could be demonstrated that a subdimension labeled epistemic curiosity and, especially, the facet openness to ideas, which includes aspects like curiosity, flexibility, willingness to learn, and creativity, are highly relevant for work‐related criteria and so far understudied in organizational research.     

儿童经验开放性:城乡差异及其与家庭、班级环境的关系

采用问卷法,以483名小学五、六年级儿童为被试,考察了经验开放性的城乡差异及其与家庭环境、班级环境的关系。结果发现:1)城市儿童经验开放性得分显著高于农村儿童。2)家庭(控制性维度除外)、班级环境与经验开放性存在有显著的相关关系。在控制了学校类型、年级和性别因素的影响后,班级环境、家庭社会经济地位、家庭环境的知识性、独立性对于经验开放性仍具有显著的预测作用。     

How Emotional Stability and Openness to Experience Support Invention: A Study with German Independent Inventors

How does invention depend on personality? Do inventors differ from noninventors? This study investigated the personal factors influencing a sample of independent inventors in Germany (N = 69). Standardized psychological questionnaires were employed to assess the Big Five personality dimensions, willingness to take risks, self-concept, and self-efficacy. For a comparison with noninventors, scores from reference samples were taken. Hypotheses were formulated based on research into creativity and entrepreneurship and the normative DABEI Stage Model of invention. As expected, the independent inventors showed higher levels of extraversion and openness to experience. In addition, independent inventors stood out in terms of emotional stability (low neuroticism scores). Surprisingly, in this sample success as an inventor correlated negatively with openness to experience. The interpretation is along the lines that inventors may work in a focused manner and technical implementation of an innovative idea may be optimized with great persistence. Discussion centers around the generalizability of the results.