Openness to Experience

After a single hearing, the 14-year-old Mozart transcribed Allegri’sMiserere – 12 minutes of music for nine voices – from memory. In his seventies, and totally blind, Euler composed and dictated dozens of major works of mathematics. Mozart and Euler are indisputably geniuses of the first magnitude, but not simply because they possessed seemingly magical mental abilities. After all, Luria (1968) documented the case of a Russian journalist who could remember virtually everything (including tables of random numbers seen decades ago) but who never produced work of any consequence. A number of autistic individuals – so-called savants – can perform prodigious feats of calculation, although they never advance mathematics. Geniuses usually have exceptional gifts, but their defining characteristic is that they use these gifts to solve artistic, intellectual, or practical problems in original ways. What is it beyond mere mental ability that leads these individuals to see the world with a fresh perspective? In this chapter, we consider the hypothesis that genius is due in some measure to personality traits, and in particular to a group of traits that define Openness to Experience. The idea that genius is tied to distinctive traits is old and widespread. In particular, since antiquity it has been asserted that genius is akin to madness, and Eysenck (1993) revived this idea by arguing that creative geniuses are high in Psychoticism, a general personality trait supposed to be a predisposing factor for psychosis.1 Jamison (1996) presented the case that artists are particularly prone to bipolar disorder. The evidence for a link between genius and mental disorder is mixed (Waddell, 1998), but suggests the hypothesis that genius may be related to personality traits in the domain of Neuroticism. A quite different set of traits was identified by Cox (1926) in a pioneering study of character in geniuses. She reported that early in life they were distinguished by (among other things) tenacity of purpose, perseverance in the face of obstacles, and a desire to excel. Simonton (2000) similarly mentioned ambition as a common characteristic of highly creative persons. These are characteristics contemporary psychologists would call aspects of Conscientiousness. Our focus in this chapter will be on a third domain of personality traits, Openness to Experience.