2017 Personality 18: Biology & Traits: Openness/Intelligence/Creativity I

[Music] Well, we're going to continue our discussion of the big five traits today, and I'm going to talk to you about openness and intelligence. Um, roughly speaking, so the first thing I want to do is put them into context. You need to understand where intelligence fits in the trait hierarchy structure.

And so we've looked at this before, but you can break the big five into the big two: plasticity and stability. We'll start with stability here. Stable people are conscientious, high in stress tolerance or emotional stability, or low in neuroticism, depending on how you look at it, and high in agreeableness.

Then, conscientiousness breaks down into industriousness and orderliness. Um, neuroticism breaks down into volatility and withdrawal, and agreeableness breaks down into politeness and compassion.

Then, for the second major trait, you have the big two trait: you have plasticity. Plasticity is made up of extraversion and openness. Those look like the reason they clump together. The reason the first three clump together, we think, is because they're roughly associated with serotonergic function.

Um, and the reason the latter two clump together is because they're roughly associated with dopaminergic function. The dopamine system mediates exploratory behavior in the face of the unknown, but it also mediates positive emotion.

And it's because in order to move forward into the unknown, it isn't that you have to experience positive emotion; it's that the emotion you experience when you're motivated to move forward into the unknown and explore is a positive emotion.

And positive emotion is very much also associated with interaction in the social environment. And maybe that's because a tremendous amount of what you're doing in the social environment is essentially exploratory behavior, right?

Because, for example, when you're communicating with people, that's primarily exploratory behavior. Um, so it's not surprising that the circuitry overlaps in that manner. Um, openness is the one we're going to concentrate on most particularly today.

And it's openness to experience, technically, and it seems to break down into intellect and openness proper. Which is, it's intellect which is interest in ideas, maybe facility with ideas; and openness, which is more like creativity.

That's, that's now you can't divide them into interest and ideas and creativity so precisely because they overlap to a great degree. But there is reason for differentiating between them.

So, for example, women are about a third of a standard deviation higher than men in openness and creativity. And men are about a third of a standard deviation higher than women in interest and ideas and intellect.

And that's actually quite a substantial difference within a trait when the two traits are so highly correlated. So there's reason to do the fractionation. So anyways, we're going to concentrate on openness today.

And the reason that I'm presenting the trait description first rather than moving immediately into, say, IQ and creativity is because it's reasonable to—it's useful to know that you can take intelligence and put it in the big five taxonomy.

And you can actually measure intelligence a lot more accurately with an IQ test and perhaps also with a creativity test than you can with a self-report personality test that relies on adjectives. You know, because I could ask you guys, "Well, how smart are you on a scale of 1 to seven?"

And that would be roughly correlated with your IQ. But if I really wanted to know how smart you were, roughly speaking, it would be much better to give you an IQ test.

And if I was wanting to know how creative you are, rather than asking you how creative you are and getting you to report, even though there would be some accuracy in that, it would be better actually to give you some of the different tests of creativity that we'll talk about today.

Now, the weird thing about the big five, or one of the weird things about it, is that we don't have great tests for the traits independently of self-report for almost all of the traits. So, for example...