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

Abstract

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.