What Openness to Experience Means
thingofthings.substack.com
thingofthings.substack.com
When I talk about openness to experience it means exactly what the author is complaining about, openness to try out new food, to try to take the train instead of flying, and yes, try some drugs, etc. For me—and a bet to most people—it has no further implications or generalizations about people’s personalities.
And the fact that psychometrisians have—after decades—still failed to demonstrate convincingly any such implications or generalizations, might indicated that the general public is right, and the scientists are wrong.
This isn’t nuanced they way that the author thinks it is. Say this is how I understand the term, but I bet that when a boss talks about it, they think of the willingness to take on new tasks and responsibilities within a company (hopefully without asking for a pay raise in return), and to an upper class art elite it can mean visiting an Escher gallery or a Mozart concert (though for me, seeing a no-name punk band is a sign of more openness then established brands).
The nuance isn’t in the personality of the person believed to hold this trait, it is in the user of that term. And I think the confusion stems from believing this is some scientifically useful term, used to describe a trait of personality that might not even exist.
No, construct validity for the Big Five has been replicated by many researchers.
> When I talk about openness to experience it means
When Paula down the street talks about "utilitarianism," it means disregard for aesthetics. That doesn't have any implications for the validity of Bentham's philosophy or whether Peter Singer is likely to decorate his house well or poorly. She just doesn't know what Bentham and Singer mean by the term.
> psychometrisians [sic] have—after decades—still failed to demonstrate convincingly
They have not failed. You just haven't read their papers.
> I bet that when a boss talks about [openness to experience], they think
If a person doesn't understand the concepts they're talking about, that's not the fault of the concepts, unless they're incoherent. It's the fault of the person who hasn't bothered to learn about the concepts.
> the confusion stems from believing this is some scientifically useful term
The Big Five are among the very few results in psychology that are usefully predictive; most of psychology is pseudoscience just below the Ancient Astronauts folks. The confusion does not stem from believing O2E is a scientifically useful term; it is.
At best it stems from a poorly chosen "improper noun"; if they had called it "Hamiha" or "splofth-zeels", this confusion wouldn't arise.
Predictive of what? Other test batteries within the field of psychometrics? I want personality traits to translate to actual behavior to consider them scientifically useful. And I want the predictive power to be greater then non-personality traits like religion, political affiliation, etc. Tell me of a research which demonstrates that convincingly. I certainly haven’t found it.
Other psychological fields have no problem doing this. For example neuroscience show a remarkable behavioral difference of people with specific brain damage, cognitive science shows similarly stark difference in behavior if e.g. some people have been primed with a similar stimuli, and even behavioral scientist can demonstrate that animals will behave radically differently after a certain behavior has been reinforced etc. You may call this pseudo-science, but what I call pseudo-science is when scientists make up new terms, operationally define them, and then validate them by correlating them with each other, without showing any use for these terms out side of their narrow field.
I don't think neuroscientists would appreciate being called psychologists, and priming research has replicated poorly enough that I'm comfortable calling it pseudoscience. And, although some predictions of behaviorism have been borne out, behaviorist psychologists publishing unreplicable experiments were Feynman's specific target in Cargo Cult Science.
> priming research has replicated poorly enough that I'm comfortable calling it pseudoscience.
You might be thinking of social priming which indeed is pseudo-science. Cognitive priming on the other hand is really easy to replicate, however the interpretations of the effect is often way out there (as is often with fresh discoveries in science [I mean just look at cosmology and all their wild interpretations of e.g. the dark matter discovery]). Given that I understand your skepticism, but the effect is there, it is easy to find, and has been replicated many times (I even did a short priming study during my undergraduates).
> Effect of personality traits through life (Wikipedia link)
If you read this section it proves my point well, earlier I said:
> I want personality traits to translate to actual behavior to consider them scientifically useful.
And this wikipedia article summarizes in the sub-section Scope of predictive power:
> The predictive effects of the Big Five personality traits relate mostly to social functioning and rules-driven behavior and are not very specific for prediction of particular aspects of behavior.
In other words: Personality traits are mainly predicting constructs within social psychology which are also measured with similar tools as those used to measure the traits in the first place. Most of the correlations are to self reported or other batteries from psychometrics.
This quote from the Personality Disorders exemplifies my criticism:
> Noticeably, FFM publications never compare their findings to temperament models even though temperament and mental disorders (especially personality disorders) are thought to be based on the same neurotransmitter imbalances, just to varying degrees.
This looks like a scientific dead end to me. This is as if dark matter would only predict gravitational deviations and not e.g. the cosmic microwave background or gravitational lensing. Dark matter was discovered by exploring these deviations, and if it would have failed to predict anything outside of that narrow scope, it would be a pretty poor theory. This has been the status of Big-5 (and other personality traits) for about the same amount of time since the discovery of dark matter.
I guess it's true that things like the IAT show a strong and easily replicable cognitive priming effect, I just hadn't thought of it that way. But the replicability problem isn't limited to social priming; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_%28psychology%29#Repli... talks about other forms of priming that have experienced replication problems.
Several of the Big Five predictive effects mentioned in the WP page do go beyond self-report instruments, even though it's true that there are many more correlations with other self-report instruments. A few of them are large effects.
That said I do admit that I’ve read some claims from cognitive psychologists about priming which probably needs to be replicated, that is cognitive psychology also suffers from the same replication crisis as social psychology. However cognitive priming never reached the same hype as social priming (and why would it; the claims are about some boring reaction times and proportions of false positives after a 1000 trials, etc; unlike social psychology where the claims are all „work faster and more accurate by changing this one thing“)
I think Gladwell wrote a pretty sensationalist article about the IAT.
Openness to experience means that the person in question will engage more often in idea-related activities. They'll be more likely to consider unusual ideas and courses of action as a result, and the unusuality of it will be relative to their environment. It's a strategy of higher activity and higher risk.
The whole article is about how his friends think that being open to experiences means automatically being into bungee jumping rather than just being willing to try it.
This seems... rather obvious.
Maybe there's a lot of people living in Manhattan whose main concern is their 4th graders position on the football team, but I somewhat doubt it
There're many city folks who don't have a wide range of concerns. Eating out in a different restaurant or going to yet another rock show or doing yet another drug after some time stops being a new experience.
At the same time, tending your garden is an experience as well. Especially anything beyond a simple lawn. Ultimately spending every weekend in your backyard is as novel as visiting bars and parties every weekend.
And, just like with any experience, you don't need to go high-end if you want a good bang for a buck. I would even argue that usually best memories and experiences come from lower end. Most memorable classic music show I visited was a play in a tiny Bavarian village in a 19th-century SPA, ticket was €5 IIRC. Music was fitting, sound was good (but I'm used to shitty rock shows so...), performers did a good job (for my dumb self) and overall it was a great accent on the whole trip.
I don't like the „you gotta go“ notion though. Ultimately humans have limited resources, both time and money and it comes down to priorities. Skipping a section or two of experiences does not make one less „open minded“. But calling out people for skipping a section or two does make one not „open minded“ for sure.
Though our interests align, I have a hard time agreeing with your last statement. If you're intentionally closing off categories of experiences, then it depends on why you're skipping those specific experiences whether or not it's close-minded. If you're unwilling to determine what those are actually like, (excluding more serious things like distancing yourself from drug or alcohol culture) then yes I'd say that's somewhat close-minded. If you're just allocating your resources towards the things you definitely like, then that's just a matter of some level of risk avoidance. You might not have known those small shows in Bavaria would be any good, but they turned out to be, and the same could be true or not true of anything you've just avoided. I'm not much of a party guy, it varies from season to season and night to night. But sometimes I gotta go, and it's usually but not always worth it, much like the symphonies.
But given next-to-infinite opportunities these days, it's easy to have rather wide range of experiences and don't have much resources left for even more opportunities.
That brings one more issue, depth vs width. Given how many options we have, it's not possible to go for both depth and width at the same time. In many cases going into depth open up many experiences that you can't access floating on the surface.
For example, I'm deep into outdoors endurance sports, cycling/hiking/etc. I did limit width a lot by not trying yoga or scuba diving or motorcycling. However, going into depth with outdoors endurance stuff opened up another layer of experiences like overnight skiing trip in -20c or doing solo 24h mtb race.
On one hand, skiing is skiing and cycling is cycling and there's not much novelty beyond 10km. On the other hand, built up stamina, skills and technical knowledge allows to expand into 3rd experiences' dimension.
As for the „gotta go“, that may depend on a person a lot. I'm not a people guy and I need a lot of solo time to recharge. I did skip many social events in exchange of a silent night of Civ or coding. I know it would have been great experiences. But I doubt I'd be able to enjoy them. Social time tolerance is one more limiting resource I guess...
I tend not to explore things that I anticipate I'll want to go deep with if I don't feel like I can make way for them yet. I'm gradually dipping my toe into hobbyist electronics stuff, very very slowly, but I've made space for it by already having appropriate kit for more lengthy day hikes, skateboarding, programming, and whatever else. Trying to solder something for the first time this weekend won't prevent me from doing a 30km hike the next day, because I don't need to spend time researching head lamps or shoes. If I wanted to expand into mountaineering, which I do, I'd need to be comfortable with leaving my other things for a bit, which only comes once they're less demanding to maintain
Are you around the west coast of Canada by chance?