Cattell's Theory Of Openness

Openness to experience was seen first in the Cattell’s 16 PF. Related concepts had often been proposed by Roger’s openness to feelings and the low pole of Rokeach’s dogmatism. Fitzgerald and coan had developed the idea, and had also created scales and showed that such facets as openness to esthetics and ideas covaried in a single dimension. Tellegen and Atkinson had also identified this as a third major dimension, which they called ‘absorption.’

McCrae and Costa (1997) regard Openness as “a broad constellation of traits with cognitive, affective, and behavioral manifestations.” (Pytlik Zilling, Hemenover, & Dienstbier, 2002. What Do We Assess When We Assess a Big 5 Trait? A Content Analysis Of The Affective, Behavioral, and Cognitive Processes

This construct requires further clarification as well as a common framework for conceptualizing and measuring the lower structure of the construct. In a study to understand the multifaceted nature of the openness construct, the researchers viewed openness as a hierarchically organized construct representing ways in which an individual typically deals with novel stimuli. Novel stimuli can appear in the form of novel experiential stimuli and novel intellectual stimuli and thus openness related behaviors could also be subsumed under the two broad domains of openness to intellectual stimulation and openness to cultural experiences. This study contained 3 studies within it. The results of the first study showed that from an exploratory factor analysis of 36 openness-related scales six facets of openness were found which were: intellectual efficiency, ingenuity, curiosity, aesthetics, tolerance and depth. The first three facets described individual differences in the efficiency in processing novel intellectual information. The remaining three facets reference individual differences in openness to new cultural experiences. The findings from the second study supported the hypothesized hierarchical measurement model, which involved two aspects and six facets of Openness. The results also provided support for the construct validity of the newly developed Openness measure, with all six facets generally showing the anticipated patterns of correlation with the Big Five traits. The purpose of the third study was to refine and shorten the six-facet scale of Openness developed in the second study, establish its measurement invariance across three groups (U.S. undergraduate students, Chinese undergraduate students, and Chinese midlevel managers), and demonstrate the usefulness of lower order measures of Openness in understanding nuanced national differences in the construct. Results