It is also worth being aware of the concept that psychologists call "interstitiality": often, facets of personality correlate to multiple Big Five traits, not just one. In my experience, here's some relevant interstitialities:
* Excitement Seeking is not just Extraverted, but also Disagreeable and slightly Open to Experience.
* Openness to Actions is fairly Extraverted.
* Aesthete-like facets such as Openness to Feelings or Openness to Aesthetics are somewhat Agreeable too.
The factor is sometimes said to split into two aspects, with Openness only being one of them and Intellect being the other. I don't think I entirely agree with this split, but it may be useful to keep the Intellect side in mind as an alternative presentation of the factor, as the aesthete-like facets don't present so much in Disagreeable people.
A good starting introduction to interstitiality might be AB5C, by the way. It's not perfect as some of the facets are placed in the wrong interstites, but it is comprehensive and helps yield an initial idea:
I'm a bit confused about how in your view hitchhiking / backpacking isn't "Openness to Experience" - this seems like a vastly different way of experiencing the world than jetsetting around the globe to the coolest parties.
Backpacking definitely is Openness! In my culture hitchhiking is considered to be very very risky in a way that makes it feel more Excitement Seeking to me, but that's definitely not a universal-- when my dad was hitchhiking around the country it was a more high-Openness thing
I was talking about this post with someone and they brought up hippies, along with "people who do party drugs", as examples of genera they think are high-Openness, although based on this post you probably wouldn't, and mountain climbers as an example of a genre they don't think is high-Openness, although based on this post you probably would.
Ostensibly, "being an aesthete" is supposed to be about "true variety-seeking". Or internal logical consistency. Or something. Well, okay. There are people who seek true variety in their psychedelic experiences, and there are people who don't seek true variety in their hiking-and-posting-pics-with-captions-from-Marcus-Aurelius habit! Trying to make the distinction based on the connotations of the activity itself is a bad idea.
However, I think this bad idea is baked into the concept of Openness itself. Yes, I know the Five Factor Model is based on factor analysis of text, and subsequent attempts to rationalize what categories the factor analysis was consistently finding. I'm about 50/50 on whether, if I used their methods on a huge dataset, I'd replicate their findings in terms of raw numbers alone, but either way I don't think running a machine learning model over huge corpuses of human text and doing tea-leaf readings into the results is a good way to do psychological theory. You end up with the discussion devolving into stuff like "Trait X is the ingroup, not the outgroup! That's Trait Y".
I do wonder about psychedelics. I'm definitely not an extravert. But I when younger, I was offered psychedelics, took them without having a clue what they were, and enjoyed the experience.
It wasn't excitement seeking. I simply lack a sense of anxiety-ridden and fear-driven caution. Yet I'm generally reserved in my behavior. It's just reserved with intense openness in all ways.
You say it's not about drugs, and yet for *every single facet* you list "people who are high".
It is also worth being aware of the concept that psychologists call "interstitiality": often, facets of personality correlate to multiple Big Five traits, not just one. In my experience, here's some relevant interstitialities:
* Excitement Seeking is not just Extraverted, but also Disagreeable and slightly Open to Experience.
* Openness to Actions is fairly Extraverted.
* Aesthete-like facets such as Openness to Feelings or Openness to Aesthetics are somewhat Agreeable too.
The factor is sometimes said to split into two aspects, with Openness only being one of them and Intellect being the other. I don't think I entirely agree with this split, but it may be useful to keep the Intellect side in mind as an alternative presentation of the factor, as the aesthete-like facets don't present so much in Disagreeable people.
Thank you so much! I love this absurdly complex system.
A good starting introduction to interstitiality might be AB5C, by the way. It's not perfect as some of the facets are placed in the wrong interstites, but it is comprehensive and helps yield an initial idea:
https://ipip.ori.org/newAB5CKey.htm
I'm a bit confused about how in your view hitchhiking / backpacking isn't "Openness to Experience" - this seems like a vastly different way of experiencing the world than jetsetting around the globe to the coolest parties.
Backpacking definitely is Openness! In my culture hitchhiking is considered to be very very risky in a way that makes it feel more Excitement Seeking to me, but that's definitely not a universal-- when my dad was hitchhiking around the country it was a more high-Openness thing
What's the difference?
What's the substantial difference, that's relevant to personality psychology?
Is a hippie an aesthete? Is a mountain climber?
I was talking about this post with someone and they brought up hippies, along with "people who do party drugs", as examples of genera they think are high-Openness, although based on this post you probably wouldn't, and mountain climbers as an example of a genre they don't think is high-Openness, although based on this post you probably would.
Ostensibly, "being an aesthete" is supposed to be about "true variety-seeking". Or internal logical consistency. Or something. Well, okay. There are people who seek true variety in their psychedelic experiences, and there are people who don't seek true variety in their hiking-and-posting-pics-with-captions-from-Marcus-Aurelius habit! Trying to make the distinction based on the connotations of the activity itself is a bad idea.
However, I think this bad idea is baked into the concept of Openness itself. Yes, I know the Five Factor Model is based on factor analysis of text, and subsequent attempts to rationalize what categories the factor analysis was consistently finding. I'm about 50/50 on whether, if I used their methods on a huge dataset, I'd replicate their findings in terms of raw numbers alone, but either way I don't think running a machine learning model over huge corpuses of human text and doing tea-leaf readings into the results is a good way to do psychological theory. You end up with the discussion devolving into stuff like "Trait X is the ingroup, not the outgroup! That's Trait Y".
I do wonder about psychedelics. I'm definitely not an extravert. But I when younger, I was offered psychedelics, took them without having a clue what they were, and enjoyed the experience.
It wasn't excitement seeking. I simply lack a sense of anxiety-ridden and fear-driven caution. Yet I'm generally reserved in my behavior. It's just reserved with intense openness in all ways.
Does excitement seeking have to be risky? I get adrenaline rushes from things like reading books and playing Magic...