Openness to Experience · Facet O4
Adventurousness measures how much unfamiliar experience you want in an ordinary life: another route home, a dish you cannot pronounce, a way of working nobody at the table has tried. It is neither courage nor a travel record. High scorers reach for the untried version, low scorers get more out of the known one.
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Adventurousness asks one narrow question: when the familiar option and the unknown one are both on the table, which one pulls? The statements circle around routine, variety, new places, unfamiliar food and untried methods. None asks whether the new thing worked, or how far from home it was. Somebody who rebuilds a kitchen every spring and never leaves the county can score high.
The scale carries the label Actions in the six way map of Openness, and the word is exact. Its five sisters ask what happens inside you: pictures, beauty, feeling, ideas, values. This one asks what you did on a Tuesday, which is why its hold on the family is loose: 0.61 with the domain total, 0.41 with the other five.
Its most telling numbers are negative and sit outside Openness: minus 0.46 with Self-Consciousness, minus 0.40 with Anxiety, minus 0.37 with Vulnerability. What separates people here is less how curious they are than how much it costs them to be a beginner while somebody watches.
Papers usually file this scale under Actions, its name in the six way split of Openness, and the same ground appears as openness in behaviour. The statements come from the public item pool Goldberg opened and Johnson scored.
Three neighbours borrow the word adventure, and each one changes what a high band would mean.
These two agree more than any other pair between Openness and Extraversion, 0.43, and still ask for different goods. Excitement-Seeking wants the dose turned up: speed, volume, physical risk. This scale wants the label changed. Somebody can love a fast descent on the same hill for years and never try a new one.
Wanting a new thing and being careless with it are close to unrelated here. With Cautiousness the figure is minus 0.16 and with Impulsiveness minus 0.05, near enough to nothing on a sample this size. Plenty of high scorers research a country for months before booking it. The scale records what attracts you, not how you handle it.
Miles are a circumstance. Money, visas, health, small children and the shape of a job decide most of an itinerary, and none of them is temperament. The scale measures the pull rather than the passport, which is why its nearest relative in the family is Intellect at 0.40: an untried idea and an untried street are cousins.
Neither setting is the braver character. One buys range and pays in depth, the other makes the same trade backwards.
Given two ways to spend an evening, a month or a career, you reach for the one you have not done. Novelty is not a treat you allow yourself, it is where attention goes on its own, so first attempts pile up faster than people expect. The bill lands on the second half: the language studied for a season, the instrument dropped in month three.
Routine wears you down like sandpaper. New places, new methods and new food are oxygen for you, and life gets organized around the next unexplored thing.
You get real returns from what other people call repetition: the same walk in a fourth season, a recipe finally right, a tool used long enough to become invisible. Depth is open to you in a way it is not to somebody permanently at a beginning. The cost accrues quietly, in options never sampled.
Familiar places, proven methods and a stable rhythm are your habitat. You choose depth in what you know over novelty for its own sake.
Four profiles in ten land in the middle band, 33 to 39 raw points for men and 32 to 38 for women. That position takes the new thing when it is offered without hunting for it weekly, so a settled life gains a few unfamiliar rooms a year.
Low, average and high split the sample 30, 40 and 30 percent, the convention these norms follow. A band says what pulls at you, not how adventurous a life you have managed to arrange, and nothing here is a verdict on either.
Ten answers worth one to five points each give a raw total between 10 and 50. The curve below comes from 135,947 finished runs of the long version, and it is close to symmetrical, which is rarer here than it sounds.
| Percentile | Raw score |
|---|---|
| 10 | 27 |
| 25 | 31 |
| 50 | 36 |
| 75 | 40 |
| 90 | 44 |
Half of all profiles land between 30 and 40 points, and the halfway mark of the sample falls between 35 and 36 for both sexes: a raw 35 is the 46th percentile for a man and the 47th for a woman. A percentile compares you with people of your own sex and age who took this test.
This is the page where the group averages have the least to report, and that absence is the finding.
Men average 35.4 points and women 35.2, a difference of 0.26 on a 40 point range and the second smallest of the thirty facets, behind Assertiveness. Age adds no more: the eight sex by age cells run from 34.7 to 35.8, the narrowest spread in the test. The two oldest cells hold about 250 people each, so read that end as a hint.
Openness reports one number for six separate hungers, and this is the one that shows up in a diary rather than in a mood. Inside the family it stands nearest to Intellect at 0.40 and Artistic Interests at 0.37, furthest from Emotionality at 0.11.
A high band at work is the person who volunteers for the unfamiliar half of the job: the new market, the tool nobody has installed, the client from an industry the team has never served. Organisations get cheap learning from them, and pay for it in the maintenance years, when a process needs keeping rather than replacing.
Between two people the difference surfaces in small logistics long before anything important. One treats a repeat visit as a loss, the other as the point of having a favourite place. The friction is rarely the trip, it is who keeps proposing and who keeps declining.
At the high end the useful move is not less appetite, it is a longer second half: keeping two or three started things past the interesting part, where the skill actually lives. At the low end the cheapest gain is size, because an unfamiliar street asks the same question as an unfamiliar country.
Twin studies put something near half the spread on Big Five traits down to inheritance, and most of the rest down to experience that even one family does not share out equally. Room to move exists, at the speed of a habit rather than a decision.
What makes this scale odd is that the population does not move either. Every other facet has an age story: the taste for intensity collapses, orderliness climbs, warmth gains a point. Here the male average sits at 34.8 under 21, 35.8 in the middle years and 34.9 past 60, and the female curve stays inside a single point.
A band on its own leaves the practical question open. The same pull next to a low Self-Discipline score gives a shelf of half learned things; next to a high one it gives six finished skills nobody expected. Pairings like that are what the paid analysis reads.
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The 300 statement version measures Adventurousness with 10 items, the short version with 4. Answers run from 1 to 5, and six of the ten are worded the other way round, so agreeing with those pulls the total down. Reversed items are flipped before the sum, and the total is read against the norm table for your sex and age.
Alpha shows how closely the statements of one scale agree with each other. In research, 0.70 and above is usually treated as solid. We counted these numbers on Johnson’s open data, so they can be checked against the published values.
The statements stay off this page on purpose. Reading the items of a scale in advance changes the answers people give, so you meet them once a test is running.
300 questions · about 35 minutes
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Put the slider where you think you stand against everyone else who took the test, then answer the statements and see how far off the guess was.
0 means lower than almost everyone who took the test, 100 means higher than almost everyone.
This is a guess, not a measurement. The test compares your answers with norms from real people.
No, and the data are unusually clear. With Cautiousness this scale runs at minus 0.16 and with Impulsiveness at minus 0.05, which on 135,947 profiles is close to no relationship at all. Wanting the untried version and acting without weighing it are separate habits.
The middle band covers 33 to 39 raw points for men and 32 to 38 for women, out of 50. Unlike most facets here the number people guess as ordinary really is ordinary: 35 points puts a man at the 46th percentile and a woman at the 47th.
We know the size of the effect rather than its cause, and the size is remarkable. All eight sex by age cells fall between 34.7 and 35.8 points, the narrowest spread of the thirty facets. The contrast next door is stark: Excitement-Seeking, which wants intensity rather than novelty, loses about ten points over the same range.
Barely. Men average 35.4 and women 35.2, a gap of 0.26 points and the second smallest of the thirty facets. That is worth saying inside Openness, where the same domain holds one of the widest female leads, in Artistic Interests, and the widest male lead in the test, in Intellect.
Openness is the domain and this is one of six facets, the one least bound to the rest: 0.61 with the domain total, 0.41 once the facet itself is removed. An average domain score therefore says little here. It can hide somebody who reads philosophy and orders the same lunch for a decade, or somebody who changes country every three years.
We measured alpha at 0.819 for the ten statement version and 0.714 for the four statement one, on the open data Johnson published. The long form is solid, the short one works as a broad band and loses more than most. Its four items also lean one way: three are reversed, so a short score rests on what you deny.
The long version puts all thirty facets in front of you with 10 statements each, the short one covers the same ground with 4 in about ten minutes. Both are free, and this percentile arrives with the rest.
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