PERSONALITY
Openness is probably the least well-defined and understood of the
Big Five traits. High scorers on this dimension tend to appreciate high
culture and new experiences. They see connections in meaning between
superficially unrelated concepts – a skill that can manifest itself in poetry,
storytelling and other forms of creative expression. A weakness of this
trait, from a theoretical point of view, is that it tends to get tangled up
with intelligence. High scorers on openness also tend to score high on
intelligence tests, but the two factors are not the same thing. Intelligence
describes the overall fitness and efficiency of a person’s nervous system
(see Chapter 12), whereas openness is more specifically about appreci-
ating and having original insights. Openness also tends to correlate with
having unusual perceptual experiences and believing in spirituality and
the paranormal. At its most extreme, openness can manifest itself as
psychosis or a schizophrenic-like personality, which is when a person
has a tendency to see meaning where there is none.
It’s important to remember that these factors are intended to be
dimensions, not black-and-white categories. One way to think about
people’s scores on the different factors is as varying thresholds which
must be passed before they are prompted to behave or react a certain
way. Everyone is capable of feeling nervous or fearful: it’s just that to a
high-scorer on neuroticism, these reactions are more easily triggered.
We’re all susceptible to temptation – it’s just that to the high scorer
on conscientiousness, the lure required is so much greater. Another
thing to bear in mind is that while it helps for descriptive purposes
George Kelly (1905–67) and the idiographic approach
to personalityWhile many psychologists have attempted to identify the principal
dimensions of personality that we all share (the “nomothetic” approach
that led to agreement on the Big Five factors), George Kelly’s Personal
Construct Theory attempted to understand how each of us is unique
(the “idiographic” approach). Personal constructs, which vary from
person to person, are those “bipolar” aspects of reality through
which we each comprehend the world – such as whether people are
punctual or tardy, whether products are cheap or expensive and so on.
Each individual’s personal constructs are not fixed, but can be updated
through their lives. Kelly believed that by uncovering the principal
constructs through which a person construes the world, we can come
to understand the kind of person they are – their unique personality.