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"Openness to Experience"
May. 13th, 2019 04:40 pmSo I was taking a Star Wars survey (you can take it here !) that asked lots of different questions. Some were of the form "on a scale of 1 to 10, how much are you a fan of General Grievous" (he's way up there, those mechanical lightsabers are great), and others were more "on a scale of not at all to very much, how would you describe your psychology in general?" Some people were kind of ?? at those, but to me they seemed pretty likely to be a shorthand for the Big Five personality traits.
I don't want to bash that system too much, especially since it acknowledges that pretty much everything is a spectrum rather than a binary toggle, and it has more statistical reliability than many other models. But there's a big caveat that should come with it, and that is that it was primarily designed by and for neurotypical people! There is one axis called "neuroticism" that compresses a lot of traits into one, but for me as an autistic person, there are issues even with the others. For instance, I'm not particularly agreeable, but I'm also not at all extroverted. In fact, I'm so introverted that I think on some occasions that can mask my disagreeableness, because I'd rather stay out of things than pick a fight. (That probably doesn't prevent me from coming off as "cold" or unempathetic, though.)
But the real puzzler is "openness to experience." Many of the associated components of it are traits I have in abundance: creativity, imagination, interest in new intellectual ideas. But other facets are things that I'm very low in: preference for doing things the same way over again, having clear schedules and itineraries, not liking new tastes or textures. The latter sets certainly, and the former probably, seem to be inherently related to my autism.
(Some of the descriptions also seem to hew close to stereotypes of "open"="good secular liberals," "closed"="bad dumb religious conservatives," which seems side-eyeable. I say this as someone who is fairly left-wing, for nebulous reasons of fairness rather than avant-gardedom, and also very conventionally religious.)
So...caveat lector, I guess.
I don't want to bash that system too much, especially since it acknowledges that pretty much everything is a spectrum rather than a binary toggle, and it has more statistical reliability than many other models. But there's a big caveat that should come with it, and that is that it was primarily designed by and for neurotypical people! There is one axis called "neuroticism" that compresses a lot of traits into one, but for me as an autistic person, there are issues even with the others. For instance, I'm not particularly agreeable, but I'm also not at all extroverted. In fact, I'm so introverted that I think on some occasions that can mask my disagreeableness, because I'd rather stay out of things than pick a fight. (That probably doesn't prevent me from coming off as "cold" or unempathetic, though.)
But the real puzzler is "openness to experience." Many of the associated components of it are traits I have in abundance: creativity, imagination, interest in new intellectual ideas. But other facets are things that I'm very low in: preference for doing things the same way over again, having clear schedules and itineraries, not liking new tastes or textures. The latter sets certainly, and the former probably, seem to be inherently related to my autism.
(Some of the descriptions also seem to hew close to stereotypes of "open"="good secular liberals," "closed"="bad dumb religious conservatives," which seems side-eyeable. I say this as someone who is fairly left-wing, for nebulous reasons of fairness rather than avant-gardedom, and also very conventionally religious.)
So...caveat lector, I guess.
