Transcript Openness to Experience

Openness to Experience
(2009)
Robert R. McCrae
&
Angelina R. Sutin
McCrae, R.R. & Sutin, A.R. (2009). Openness to experience. In
M.R. Leary and R.H. Hoyle (Eds) Handbook of Individual
Differences in Social Behavior, 257-273. New York: Guilford.
Openness: An orientation
Difficulty in Conceptualization
• One of the dimensions of the Five-Factor Model
• Also be called intellect, culture or imagination in lexical systems, and
these are not necessarily close enough to be considered synonymous.
• Openness implies a willingness to adopt novel and unconventional
ways of thinking and behaving, manifest in such traits as creativity,
imaginativeness, curiosity, and aesthetic appreciation.
(Haslam,N, 2007)
• Most loosely related of any of the five factors
• Indispensable?
Extraversion
Extraversion
Neuroticism
Neuroticism
Psychoticism
Agreeableness
Conscientiousness
Openness
Performance
• High Openness: imaginative, sensitive to art and beauty, emotionally differentiated,
behaviorally flexible, intellectually curious, and liberal in values.
• Low Openness: down-to-earth, uninterested in art, shallow in affect, set in their ways,
lacking curiosity, and traditional in values.
Open people admire openness, closed people despise it.
Strongly heritable
Changes over time
•
Openness shows high levels of differential stability across the adult lifespan.
•
Increasing from early adolescence until some time in the 20s, and then gradually
declining
Constructs
Correlations with Intelligence: about 0.4 with divergent thinking
0.3 with verbal and facial emotion recognition task
0.26 with verbal score
Authoritatianism
-0.29 ~ 0.63
Need for Closure (the desire for definite and final answers)
Need for Cognition
High, with high C
Thought Complexity
-0.36
Emotional Intelligence
Modest
-0.42
Individual social interactions
Person presentation and perception
• Open individuals express themselves across a variety of
mediums.
• In Interpersonal interactions
• In Daily lives
• Artistic and intellectual proclivities.
Observers are fairly good at picking up on these
behavioral indicators of openness.
However, these lay conceptions can be inaccurate.
• Office characteristics are largely unrelated
to the individual’s actual level of openness.
• Openness is unrelated to using big words
• Openness also is unrelated to the behaviors
on personal web pages or in chatroom
How accurately others can infer openness?
1. Multiple judges do agree with each other on the individual’s level of
openness, which suggests that lay conceptions of openness are not
idiosyncratic.
• Observers agree on Openness when judging personal websites, top-10
song lists, and offices and bedrooms
• Compared to the other traits in the FFM, Openness and Extraversion
show similar levels of consensus and both remain high as
acquaintanceship increase.
2. Accuracy also depends on the task observed.
Laboratory studies
1. A very narrow sliver of time for perceivers to form a judgment of
Openness.
• Perceivers form an impression of openness very quickly that is resistant
to change.
2. Correlational studies among people who have know each other, not for
seconds or minutes, but for up to 70s.
• The length of acquaintance increases cross-observer agreement
Individual social interactions
Marriage and family
“At each stage, from deciding whether to get married to parenting,
Openness shapes these choices, interactions, and
consequences”
(McCrae & Sutin, 2009)
1. There is often social pressure to “find someone, settle down, and
start a family”;
2. People want their ideal partner to be “just like themselves” especially
on Openness (Figueredo, Sefcek, & Jones, 2006);
3. However at the stage of marriage it is slightly more important to be
similar on Conscientiousness (Botwin, Buss, & Shackelford, 1997);
4. “Despite preferences, people settle for much less” (Figueredo et al.,
2006);
5. Physical attractiveness, proximity, or availability may be more
important than ideal personality;
6. There are mixed findings showing different similarity correlations for
personality traits:
- Watson and colleagues (2004) found no similarity correlations for any
of the FFM personality traits (r=-.03), but the highest similarity
correlations for age, religiousness and political conservatism (r=.71);
- Neyer and Voigt (2004) found significant correlations for both O (r=.25)
and C (r=.39), but not for N, E, or A;
- McRae and colleagues (in press) found that O had the largest
correlation (r=.22). In addition:
a) Facet-level analysis showed that mostly O to Values brings people
together
b) People also tend to choose and marry partners who are similar on
O2: Aesthetics
7. However “discrepancies between ideal partner personality and actual
partner personality do not predict dissatisfaction” (Botwin et al., 1997);
8. Communication is also an important key in healthy and satisfying
relationships
- Couples high in O are more likely to communicate effectively in order to
solve their marital problems;
10. In some context low O may be associated with better outcomes;
11. O shapes daily life and especially the parenting style:
- Open parents are more open-minded and tolerant whilst closed parents
demand obedience (Metsapelto and Pulkkinen, 2003).
Individual social interactions
Strangers and friends
• Open and closed individuals differ in their political
orientations, beliefs about religion and intellectual
interests that can influence their friendships.
• Openness shapes interpersonal interactions:
o casual interactions
o long-term committed relationships
• Implications for a variety of outcomes:
o relationship satisfaction
o conflict resolution
o parenting
o social support
Social and political effects
Prejudice
• O correlates with a measure of prejudice -0.49;
all facets except Ideas (-0.25 - -0.49); Values
correlates -0.55
O correlates with a measure of sexism -0.32; all
facets except Ideas and Fantasy (-0.18 - -0.43)
(Ekehammer & Akrami, 2007)
• Self-report racial attitudes lower in participants
with high O; more favourable impressions of a
fictional black character; rate a black interviewee
more positively (Flynn, 2005)
• Black people high in anti-White attitudes more
likely to score high on O (Lecci & Johnson, 2008)
Political attitudes
• Openness correlates significantly and negatively with
right-wing ideology, except in political party members
(-0.37 - -0.47)
Values correlates with political ideology in all groups
(-0.37- -0.57)
Surprisingly, Ideas was associated with membership
of an extreme right-wing political party
(Van Hiel, Kossowska & Mervielde, 2000)
• Negative correlation between openness and
conservative ideology (-.41)
More strongly related to cultural than economic
conservatism
(Van Hiel & Mervielde, 2004)
Aggregate openness and culture
• Nations differ systematically in mean levels of traits, but
this difference is smaller than the differences within
cultures.
• Most open? Switzerland, Serbia, Austria & Germany.
• Modern, progressive & well-educated.
• Prefer egalitarian to hierarchical social structures & focus
is on the individual rather than the group.
• Concerned about tolerance, imagination & personal
fulfilment – common goals in open individuals.
• Least open? Croatia, Spain, Hong Kong, Malaysia &
India.
• Traditional cultures are influenced by religion and are
against abortion, divorce & euthanasia – values shared by
closed individuals.
Genetic or environmental?
• Acculturation studies (= members of an ethnic
group moving from one culture to another).
• Hong Kong born Chinese score ½ sd. lower than
Canadian born Chinese.
• Canadian born Chinese score sig. lower than
European Chinese.
• Genetic and environmental influences may be
mutually reinforcing.
• Critics: differences may be due to translation
problems or culture specific response styles.
Conclusion
• Openness to experience has a number of
consequences for social behaviour, and so
is an important construct in the study of
personality and social psychology