Openness to Experience · Facet O2
Artistic Interests tracks how strongly beauty registers with you. Music, paintings, landscapes, a well cut phrase: does any of it reach you, and do you go looking for it? High scorers can be physically moved. Low scorers walk past and feel they missed nothing.
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Artistic Interests gauges how much beauty matters to you. The statements ask about art, music, poetry and scenery: whether they hold your attention, whether you seek them out, whether a beautiful room and a drab one make a different day of it. Neither knowledge nor good taste is asked about.
The facet lives in Openness to Experience and faces outward. Imagination plays out of sight and Intellect argues, while this one registers what arrives through the senses. It is also the nearest thing the domain has to a substitute for itself: of the six, this scale overlaps most with the other five, 0.54 in our data.
And no scale in the whole test stands higher. Across 135,947 profiles the average is 40.2 out of 50, first of all thirty facets, and among women 41.9, the highest group average anywhere in this test. So a raw 40 falls just above the midpoint for men and inside the bottom third for women.
Research on the six facet structure of Openness files this scale under Aesthetics, and earlier work calls the same ground aesthetic sensitivity. Our questions come from the open pool Johnson documented, never from a proprietary inventory.
Three neighbours crowd this scale, and each of them alters how a number here should be read.
The scale records what reaches you, not what your hands can do. Someone who cannot hold a tune lands at the very top, while a jobbing illustrator can sit mid scale because the craft became a job. Technique and training are separate matters, and no statement goes near them.
These two get used as one word, and the data will not merge them: they share 0.35, less than this facet shares with Sympathy over in Agreeableness. Imagination conjures what was never there; this scale answers what is already out in the world, made by a person or shaped by a landscape.
Feeling for beauty is supposed to come bundled with fragile nerves, and our numbers refuse it. Of the twenty four facets outside Neuroticism this one keeps the flattest tie to that whole family: nothing above 0.11 with any of its six, and a flat zero with Anxiety.
Neither end is the finer sensibility. One end pays attention to how things look and sound, the other puts it somewhere else.
Four bars of music can rearrange your afternoon. You notice the light in a room and the line of a hill, and a drab space wears you down even when all of it works. Galleries and wide views are fuel, not duty. The bill comes in time and money, and in caring about what the people near you file under nice.
Beauty in music, art or nature lands on you physically. An ugly environment genuinely drains you, and an inspiring one raises everything you do inside it.
You judge a thing by what it does. A chair that takes your weight wins over one that photographs well, and a poem is a slow route to a small conclusion. The hours others lose to two shades of one colour stay in your pocket. The cost is a channel turned down: a place sets your mood and you get no signal from it.
You judge things by usefulness first. A tool that works beats a beautiful one, and that honesty about priorities keeps your choices simple.
Four in ten land in the middle band, and the band is not the same for both sexes: 35 to 42 points for men, 40 to 45 for women. Beauty gets through at good moments and does not set the terms of the week.
Low, average and high split the sample 30 / 40 / 30, the convention Johnson applies to these norms. These are bands in a sample, not types of person, and no score rules on your taste.
Ten answers worth one to five points each put the raw score between 10 and 50. The curve below comes from 135,947 finished profiles and is crowded against its top end.
| Percentile | Raw score |
|---|---|
| 10 | 31 |
| 25 | 37 |
| 50 | 42 |
| 75 | 46 |
| 90 | 49 |
The median is 39 for men and 43 for women, and that 43 is the highest median any group reaches across the thirty scales. Half of all men score between 34 and 44, half of all women between 39 and 47, so a 40 is unremarkable rather than strong. Percentiles compare you with people of your own sex and age who took this test, all of whom chose to answer it online.
This is where the sexes separate most outside the anxious corner of the test, and the one place in Openness where the years add rather than subtract.
Women average 41.9 points and men 38.0, a gap of 3.9 on a scale that spans 40, and only Anxiety separates the sexes more. Age pushes both curves up: men from 37.2 under 21 to 39.3 past 60, women from 41.5 to 42.8. This is the only Openness facet that climbs in both sexes across every age band. The climb is small, and the top age cell has about 250 people per sex, so read it as a hint.
Openness hangs together loosely: two of its facets share less on average than two facets of any other domain. So the bars below repay reading one at a time, and some of what this scale travels with lies outside it.
A high score turns up wherever the finished thing is seen or heard. You catch the slide that went out unchecked, the wording that clangs, the release that works and still feels cheap, and colleagues learn to hand you the last ten per cent. The same eye argues for one more round on work already good enough, while a low score keeps to the brief and ships.
Shared taste does quiet work here. High scorers hand over a concert, a book or a coastline to say something they cannot say straight, and a shrug in return lands harder than intended. Low scorers put their care into the workaday register, and can miss that an invitation to look at something was an invitation to come closer.
At the high end, ask what the sensitivity feeds. With no work to attach to it becomes taste alone, and whether the making happens depends on the profile beside it: read the Conscientiousness facets on the same page. The low end needs no repair, though surroundings act on your mood at the usual rate whether or not the signal shows up.
Twin work attributes close to half of the variation in Big Five scales to genes, and most of the remainder to circumstances that even children of one family do not have in common. There is space to move, but the ranking between people is much the same after ten years.
What is unusual here is which way it goes. Most of Openness thins with the years, Imagination sharply, while feeling for beauty gains a little in every age band of both sexes. Exposure is the obvious candidate: taste is one of the few parts of a personality a life keeps adding to. But these norms hold different people side by side at one time, so part of that slope belongs to the generations, not to growing older.
One number cannot say what the sensitivity is attached to. High Artistic Interests beside high Self-Discipline builds things; beside a low one it collects them. That combination is what the paid report works on.
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Artistic Interests takes 10 statements in the 300 item test and 4 in the 120 item one. Answers are worth one to five points, and five of the ten are written the other way round and turned over before the total is made. The total then goes against the norm table for your sex and age group, which makes it a percentile.
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.
We keep the statements off this page on purpose. Reading them before answering shifts the answers, so they appear only once a test is running.
300 questions · about 35 minutes
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Set the slider where you believe you sit next to the rest, then take the test and see how far the guess was out.
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. The scale never asks what you can make, only whether art, music and scenery reach you and how much room you give them. People who have never performed reach the top of it routinely. Making art also takes craft and persistence, and those live in other parts of a profile.
The top band opens at 43 raw points for men and 46 for women, high because the whole scale is crowded upward. So 40 out of 50 puts a man just past his midpoint and a woman in her bottom third.
Women average 41.9 and men 38.0, a gap of 3.9 points that only Anxiety exceeds. The same difference turns up in large samples and its causes stay argued over: what children are encouraged to notice, reporting style, and biology. It compares group averages and predicts nothing about one person.
Here the data is plain. Of the facets outside Neuroticism this one keeps the weakest links to that domain: nothing above 0.11 with any of its six scales, and a flat zero with Anxiety. The trembling aesthete gets no support in our numbers.
Openness is the domain, this is the second of its six facets. It correlates 0.71 with its own domain and 0.54 with the other five together, the tightest fit any Openness facet manages. Most of the variation is still unshared, so a mid band domain score can hide a strong pull toward beauty.
Alpha came out at 0.811 for the ten statement form and 0.748 for the four statement one, both on the open data Johnson published. Both work; the short form saves time and pays for it in sharpness, most visibly at facet level.
Ten statements decide this score and the same run settles the other twenty nine. Take the long form for the sharpest facet detail, the short one when time is tight.
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