LECTURE NOTES 8

Openness to
Experience:
Intellect &
Openness
Lecture Notes 8

Discovering Personality​ with​ Dr. Jordan B. Peterson 

 LECTURE NOTES 8

This lecture discusses the Big Five personality trait ​openness to experience​. ​Openness to
experience is composed of two aspects:​ ​openness and intellect.​ ​Openness is the Big Five
personality trait that is most closely linked with IQ and is closely associated with creativity.

What is openness to experience?

Openness to experience is the Big Five personality trait associated with intelligence, creativity,
abstract thinking, and artistic interest.

Open people are described as original, imaginative, creative, complex, curious, and
having broad interests.​ People who are high in openness to experience are motivated by
ideas and/or aesthetic experience for its own sake and tend to orient their worlds around such
pursuits. They enjoy the beauty of nature, believe in the importance of art, are reflective,
become deeply immersed in music, enjoy poetry, are highly emotional, need a creative outlet,
and see the beauty in things that other people may not notice.

People who are lower in openness are described as conventional, concrete, uncreative, simple,
incurious, and have narrow interests.

People who are high in intellect are quick to understand abstract ideas, can handle a lot of
information, solve complex problems, enjoy philosophical discussions, read often, and think
quickly. The aspect of intellect is the personality reflection of IQ. People who are intelligent tend
to seem interested in and competent at manipulating ideas.

What is IQ?

IQ is a measure of a person’s intelligence.​ Intelligence reflects a person’s capacity to learn,

their processing speed, and the number of abstract variables they can manipulate at one time.

Discovering Personality​ with​ Dr. Jordan B. Peterson 

 LECTURE NOTES 8

To understand IQ, think of a typical elementary school classroom. There are often one or two
kids in a class who have been held back a grade. These children are often lower in IQ. There
are often another few kids at the very top of the class who master the material quickly and
easily. These children are higher in IQ.

You can create a rudimentary IQ test by gathering a large library of questions that can be about
anything as long as they cover a range of topics. If you randomly select one hundred questions,
administer them to one hundred people, then sort by how many questions they answer right,
you’ll be able to rank order them by IQ. You’ll get the same rank order if you ask the same
people a different set of questions. IQ is one of the most reliable tests ever created, and it is
remarkably stable across time.

The U.S. military has done a lot of research on IQ because they want to be able to easily
identify competent people. Their research revealed that there is no way to train someone with
an IQ lower than 83 that would make them more useful than burdensome, so it is illegal to
induct a person with an IQ under 83 into the U.S. Army.

The army is one of the most eager employers--they don’t turn people away without a good
reason. It is therefore very difficult to find a suitable job for people with extremely low IQs; often,
no such jobs exist. A walloping 10% of the population meets this criterion, and it is a real
struggle for them to get by in the world.

The Pareto Distribution of Creative Ability

The Pareto distribution asserts that 80% of the benefits are found in 20% of the effort, and
vice-versa. (For more information on this, refer to the additional material in Lecture 2.)

Discovering Personality​ with​ Dr. Jordan B. Peterson 

 LECTURE NOTES 8

Some examples of Pareto-distributed phenomena include the distribution of wealth in a society,

the size of cities, and the mass of stars. It also often applies to business productivity, where a
fraction of employees does almost all of the work.

To illustrate the power of the Pareto distribution in creative ability, Dr. Peterson explains that
50% of classical music repertoire comes from just five composers, and 95% of what is played is
drawn from 5% of their total compositions.

Creativity

Creativity is the ability to generate a diverse range of original but practical ideas, and is often
measured using a divergent thinking test. An example of such a test might be to “Write down as
many uses for a brick as possible in a specified amount of time”. These tests can be scored by
proportional originality, which involves comparing a person’s answers to the answers other
people gave, as well as categorical diversity, which reflects how many categories of responses
a person came up with.

However, Dr. Peterson’s research team reasoned that creative achievement would better reflect
a person’s creativity. They developed the​ Creative Achievement Questionnaire​ (available in
the additional materials) that consists of rank-ordered levels of accomplishment within a number
of creative domains. These rank orders were verified by accomplished professionals in each
domain.

The results of this questionnaire are not normally distributed; rather, they are Pareto-distributed.
86% of people score either 0 or 1 in any given artistic domain on the creative achievement
questionnaire, while a very small number of people score highly overall. Thus, the questionnaire
shows that despite what is propagated in Western media and culture,​ most people are not
creative​.

Discovering Personality​ with​ Dr. Jordan B. Peterson 

 LECTURE NOTES 8

Key Takeaways

1. Creativity is the ability to generate novel and practical ideas. It is an extremely rare trait,
despite what our culture and media have led us to believe.
2. Openness to experience is the Big Five personality trait composed of two aspects:
openness and intellect.
a. Openness is associated with creativity and interest in aesthetics
b. Intellect is associated with intelligence and interest in ideas
3. IQ is the best measure of intelligence, and it is one of the most reliable measures in all of
psychology. IQ measures a person’s capacity to learn, the number of abstract variables
they can manage at one time, and their processing speed.
4. The richer and more egalitarian a society becomes, the more the IQ differences are
determined by biological factors.
5. Openness trait descriptors:
a. Enjoy the beauty of nature
b. Believe in the importance of art
c. Love to reflect on things
d. Get deeply immersed in music
e. Like poetry
f. Seldom mention the emotional aspects of paintings and pictures
g. Need a creative outlet
h. Tend to get lost in thought
i. Daydream frequently
j. See the beauty in things that others might not notice.
6. Intellect trait descriptors:
a. Quick to understand things
b. Understand abstract ideas
c. Can handle a lot of information
d. Like to solve complex problems

Discovering Personality​ with​ Dr. Jordan B. Peterson 

 LECTURE NOTES 8

e. Find interest in philosophical discussion

f. Like difficult reading material
g. Have a rich vocabulary
h. Think quickly
i. Learn things quickly)
j. Formulate clear ideas
7. Distribution conceptualization:
a. Original versus conventional
b. Imaginative versus down-to-earth
c. Creative versus uncreative
d. Broad interest versus narrow interest
e. Complex versus simple
f. Curious versus incurious
g. Daring versus cautious
h. Independent versus dependent
i. Untraditional versus traditional
j. Liberal versus conservative

Discovering Personality​ with​ Dr. Jordan B. Peterson 

 LECTURE NOTES 8

Additional Reading & Mentions

This is a list of additional resources mentioned by Dr. Peterson in this lecture, as well as reading
materials, studies, and videos to enhance your learning experience.

● Creative Achievement Questionnaire (mentioned 1:53):

○ Study​:
■ Reliability, Validity, and Factor Structure of the Creative Achievement
Questionnaire​ (free)
○ Videos​:
■ Jordan Peterson on How Creative You Are​ (free)
■ Jordan Peterson: Oppression of Creative People​ (free)
○ Test​:
■ Creative Achievement Questionnaire​ (CAQ) (paid)
■ The Happiness Hypothesis ​(paid) &
● Pareto Distribution (mentioned 4:05) see additional sources in Lecture 2
● Karl Marx (mentioned 7:48)
○ Books​:
■ The Communist Manifesto​ (paid)
■ Capital ​(paid)
● Cognitive Distribution (mentioned 16:00)
○ Studies​:
■ Distributed Cognition: : Where the Cognitive and the Social Merge​ (free)
■ Distributed Cognition: A Framework for Understanding the Role of
Computers in Classroom Teaching and Learning​ (paid)
○ Book​:
■ Distributed Cognitions: Psychological and Educational Considerations
(paid)

Discovering Personality​ with​ Dr. Jordan B. Peterson 

 LECTURE NOTES 8

● Bjørn Lomborg (mentioned 24:11):

○ Studies​:
■ How healthy is the world?​ (free)
■ The Benefits and Costs of Alternative Strategies to Improve Educational
Outcomes​ (free)
○ Books​:
■ Global Crises, Global Solutions​ (paid)
○ Videos​:
■ How to make the world better. Really. With Dr. Bj​ø​rn Lomborg​ (free)
○ Website​:
■ https://www.lomborg.com/​ (free)

Discovering Personality​ with​ Dr. Jordan B. Peterson