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Openness to Experience Test

Twenty-four questions on the openness scale, broken into the six things it is actually made of.

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24 questions across 1 scale, about 5 minutes|Published scoring key from IPIP-NEO Openness to Experience scale, 24 items across six facets, not invented

Authors: International Personality Item Pool; facet structure after Johnson (2014), IPIP-NEO-120

Licence: Public domain IPIP items, free to use without permission

What this test measures

Openness to experience

Appetite for ideas, novelty, art and abstraction. Often confused with intelligence, though it measures whether you enjoy thinking, not how well you do it.

High. Unfamiliar ideas attract you rather than unsettle you. You'd rather have a new problem than a solved one, and you notice aesthetic detail other people walk past.

Low. You back what is proven, concrete and already working. Theory for its own sake doesn't hold you; results do.

6 facets

  • Imagination
  • Artistic Interests
  • Emotionality
  • Adventurousness
  • Intellect
  • Liberalism

What answering this test looks like

Question 1 of 24

How accurately does this describe you?

Have a vivid imagination.

  • 1Very inaccurate
  • 2Moderately inaccurate
  • 3Neither accurate nor inaccurate
  • 4Moderately accurate
  • 5Very accurate
One item at a time, keyboard or mouse. Every one of the 24 items is worded this way, and your place is saved as you go.

What this test is

Openness is the O in OCEAN and the trait that took longest to settle. Early factor studies disagreed about what the fifth factor even was, and the alternative name Intellect is still used in some lexical research, which is part of why the trait and intelligence get conflated so persistently.

What the scale actually captures is appetite rather than ability: whether unfamiliar ideas attract or unsettle you, whether you notice aesthetic detail, and whether you would rather have a new problem than a solved one. Measured ability is a separate construct with a separate literature.

The items here are the 24 openness items from the IPIP-NEO, so the facets and the keying are the ones the research literature uses, and the items are public domain.

How this test is scored

  1. 24 answers

    Each answer you give is a number on the published response scale.

  2. One scale

    Answers belonging to the same scale are added together.

  3. A band

    Each total is read against the bands printed for that scale.

Twenty-four items on a five-point accuracy scale, with reverse-keyed items flipped before summing. The total runs from 24 to 120 and each facet from 4 to 20. The bar shows your position inside that range, not a percentile against a norm group.

Scoring runs in your browser from your own answers. It is deterministic, so the same answers always produce the same result, and no part of it is generated, estimated or inferred.

How accurate this test is

Twenty-four items make the overall score steadier than any single trait in a short five-factor form, where openness usually gets ten items or fewer.

The facets are four items each. Treat a gap of a few points between two facets as nothing and a gap of thirty as real.

Openness is the most stable of the five traits across adult life, so a result here is less sensitive to the week you take it in than a neuroticism result would be.

The underlying IPIP facet scales and their published alphas are listed on ipip.ori.org, where the item pool is maintained.

Who this test is for

Worth taking if

  • Anyone who has seen openness in a Big Five result and wants to know what it actually measures
  • Working out whether your openness runs through art, ideas or appetite for novelty
  • People who want one trait in detail rather than five in outline

Not the right tool for

  • Measuring intelligence or cognitive ability, which this does not do
  • Inferring somebody's politics from the liberalism facet
  • Assessing or screening other people, including candidates

What this test cannot tell you

Openness is not intelligence. This measures preference for ideas and novelty, not cognitive ability, and the two are only loosely related.

Four items per facet is a short scale. Read the facets as a pattern, not as six precise measurements.

The facet named Liberalism measures readiness to question tradition and authority, not party politics, and the facet named Intellect measures enjoyment of abstraction, not IQ.

Scores are positions within the scale, not percentiles against a norm group.

This is a self-assessment questionnaire, not a diagnostic instrument and not medical advice.

Take this test now

24 questions, about 5 minutes. Your answers are scored on this device and stored on this device. There is no account to create and nothing is sent to a server. Progress saves as you go, so a long assessment can be finished across more than one sitting.

Start Openness

No sign up, ever. Every item in this assessment comes from IPIP-NEO Openness to Experience scale, 24 items across six facets, and the page above tells you exactly how each score is worked out before you answer anything.

Openness: frequently asked questions

What does high openness mean?

That unfamiliar ideas attract you rather than unsettle you. High scorers connect ideas across fields that do not normally meet, tolerate ambiguity long enough to find a better answer, and notice when a standard approach has stopped fitting. The cost is follow-through: the elegant option can win over the one that ships.

What does low openness look like?

A preference for what is proven, concrete and already working. Low scorers judge a proposal by whether it delivers rather than whether it is interesting, stay with an approach instead of reinventing it, and tend to go deep in one area rather than broad across many. The risk is staying past the point something stopped working.

Is openness the same as being intelligent?

No, and this is the most common misreading of the trait. Openness measures whether you enjoy thinking about abstract things, not how well you do it. The overlap with measured intelligence is modest. Someone can be highly capable and prefer concrete, practical problems, and someone can love ideas without being unusually quick.

What does the liberalism facet measure?

Readiness to question tradition, authority and inherited values, which is a much narrower thing than political affiliation. It is a technical term from the Five-Factor tradition and predates its current political associations. A high score on it says nothing reliable about how you vote.

Can openness change over time?

Less than the other four traits. Openness is the most stable of the Big Five across adult life, drifting down slightly with age for most people. Deliberate exposure to unfamiliar fields moves it more than trying to feel differently does, and the effect shows up over years rather than weeks.

How accurate is this openness test?

The overall score comes from 24 public-domain IPIP items, which is a longer and steadier measure of this one trait than most online quizzes and than any single trait in a short Big Five form. The six facets are four items each, so read those as a pattern rather than as precise numbers.

Is it free, and do I need an account?

Free, with no account. The items are public domain, the scoring runs in your browser, and nothing is sent to a server. Your answers stay in the browser that produced them unless you choose to share the link.

Where these questions come from

The 24 items and their keying are the openness items of the IPIP-NEO-120 already used on this site, derived from the administration form and checked to give four items per facet. Check the source.

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