In my recent reading, I’ve often come across a personality dimension called Openness to Experience. It’s basically your tendency to be willing to accept new things, try new experiences, and learn new knowledge.
You’ve probably heard people say that personality tendencies aren’t inherently good or bad. Being a little more introverted or a little more extroverted each comes with its own strengths and weaknesses; there’s no absolute good or bad.
But when it comes to Openness to Experience, the overall picture is that higher is much better than lower. Quite a lot of data has consistently found that high openness is positively correlated with many beneficial physical and psychological indicators.
In other words, people who enjoy encountering and learning about new things and new experiences are clearly healthier, psychologically and physically, than people who prefer to stay inside their existing systems of understanding and avoid anything unfamiliar.
1. Openness affects health and longevity
In an earlier article called Smart People Age More Slowly (Congming Ren, Lao de Man), I mentioned that people with high IQs tend to have greater Openness to Experience. They’re more willing to learn new knowledge and skills, take part in new activities, and try unfamiliar things. This mindset subjectively lowers their “psychological age,” which in turn slows physical aging.
More new knowledge and new experiences strengthen neuroplasticity and encourage the brain to form new synapses and connections, which is closely tied to brain health. Quite a few interventions designed to delay dementia are, at heart, about helping older people strengthen neuroplasticity through fresh experiences.
2. Openness affects life satisfaction
A study mentioned in Breaking Bad Habits, a book introduced in my Psychology New Knowledge Course (Xinli Xinzhi Ke), tracked personality changes in more than 8,000 participants. One finding was that, across two surveys conducted four years apart, participants whose Openness to Experience had increased reported greater life satisfaction.
Why do people with greater openness feel that life is happier?
Apart from the fact that more fresh experiences can make life more fun in themselves, I suspect there may be another reason: open-minded people are more sensitive to all kinds of beauty in everyday life.
For example, one study found that, while listening to the same song, people higher in Openness to Experience got more goosebumps than closed-off people—that is, what’s known as aesthetic chills, or frisson. So, on the surface, highly open people may not seem to have experienced much more, but their actual experiences are richer and more intense.
3. Highly open people make better decisions
Philip Tetlock is an expert who studies how humans predict the future. One of his studies found that high Openness to Experience is one of the essential qualities of a “superforecaster.” People who like to use their existing knowledge systems to make categorical, ironclad predictions tend to perform terribly when predicting the future. Excellent forecasters are open to newly acquired knowledge and information. They gather as much information as possible from as many sources as possible, and they’re also better at changing their existing views in response to new knowledge.
We can make a small inference: people high in Openness to Experience are better at forming accurate expectations about the future, and therefore better at making wiser decisions on that basis.
Now, let’s talk about how to increase your Openness to Experience:
1. Read widely, travel widely, and watch new movies
What signal tells you that you’re “old”? When you only enjoy watching the same old movies you’ve already seen over and over again.
Read more books you haven’t read before—preferably in new fields. Learn more fresh knowledge (Looks like all my relatives who are willing to spend money on my Psychology New Knowledge Course and fan group are the real winners in life ^_^). Travel more—preferably independently. Watch more newly released movies and TV series.
2. Leave your comfort zone and learn new skills
Besides “watching” new things, you should also learn to “do” new things, challenging the boundaries of your abilities from time to time.
3. Play games?
The pros and cons of playing video games are still hotly debated. But some games do seem to train the brain, strengthening its plasticity and flexibility. Especially in some large-scale games, the plot, gameplay, and controls form a fairly complex system. To master one of these games, you have to thoroughly learn a complex new system—which is excellent mental exercise.
References:
1. Aesthetic chills: Colver, M. C., & El-Alayli, A. (2016). Getting aesthetic chills from music: The connection between openness to experience and frisson. Psychology of Music, 44(3), 413-427.
2. The research on superforecasters, cited from: Pinker, S. (2018). Enlightenment now: the case for reason, science, humanism, and progress. Penguin.
Note
- This Psychology New Knowledge Course (Xinli Xinzhi Ke) series consisted of short popular-psychology and conversational essays written to accompany related content from Zhichao Wei’s Psychology New Knowledge Course (Xinli Xinzhi Ke). They were published on the now-shut-down platform Fantuan, and the original links no longer exist.
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