What is adventurousness?

What does adventurousness mean?

In ordinary use, adventurous suggests mountains and long flights. The personality sense is broader and far more everyday: the pull toward the version you have not tried yet, whether that is a country, a dish, a route home or a way of running a Monday. The plain definition is this: how much you like trying new things and going new places instead of sticking with what you know. Compressed further, it is an appetite for the unfamiliar: new places, new food, new ways, chosen for their newness alone.

The key word is newness: whether unfamiliarity is itself attractive, so that a person picks the unknown option when the familiar one would have done. The clearest test is small. Given a menu you have read a hundred times, do you order the thing you love or the thing you have never had.

It is not courage, which is acting despite fear and applies to anything difficult, novel or not. Nor is it risk tolerance. Someone can want a new city, a new job and a new instrument while wearing a helmet and reading the insurance terms. And it is not restlessness; plenty of high scorers have one home and a hundred experiments running inside it.

Which personality dimension is adventurousness part of?

Adventurousness is a facet of Openness to Experience, the dimension that gathers curiosity, imagination, aesthetic interest and receptivity to the unfamiliar. It is the behavioural end of that dimension: other facets describe what a mind reaches for, this one describes what a person does on a Saturday.

In the NEO inventories this is the fourth Openness facet and it is called Actions (Costa & McCrae, 1992). The public-domain IPIP pools, which offer open-licence items as an alternative to commercial inventories, label the same facet Adventurousness, and it is one of the thirty reported by the IPIP-NEO-120 (Goldberg et al., 2006; Johnson, 2014). The BFI-2 uses a three-facet Openness structure of Aesthetic Sensitivity, Intellectual Curiosity and Creative Imagination, so it does not carry this facet separately (Soto & John, 2017). Between domain and facet sit two broader aspects, Openness and Intellect, and the appetite for new experience belongs to the first (DeYoung et al., 2007).

Wellington scores it from the NEO-PI-R O4 Actions facet and the matching IPIP Adventurousness facet, with wording that stays close to variety seeking rather than thrill seeking. It is one of 13 traits reported beneath Openness to Experience; the hierarchy is in the Big Five facets, explained.

How is adventurousness different from excitement seeking?

Adventurousness and excitement seeking are the pair most often confused, and the difference is what is being chased. Adventurousness wants variety: something not tried before. Excitement seeking, a facet of Extraversion rather than Openness, wants intensity: noise, speed, a raised heart rate. They arrive together often, and they come apart often enough that the distinction matters.

Picture the combinations. High adventurousness with low excitement seeking moves to an unfamiliar country and spends the first month in its libraries, delighted and entirely calm. High excitement seeking with low adventurousness rides the same roller coaster forty times: the thrill is the point, the novelty is not. The other neighbour is cultural engagement, seeking out books, music and ideas from outside your circle, which is novelty taken in through the mind rather than by being somewhere different.

What does high adventurousness look like?

High scorers treat the unfamiliar as an opportunity rather than a cost, and say yes before they have finished hearing the question.

• Your holidays are rarely to the same place twice.
• You change a recipe the first time you cook it, on principle.
• A new job, a new tool or a new city is exciting before it is daunting.
• Routines that other people find comforting start to feel like a narrow corridor.

The costs are specific. Novelty is expensive: it takes time, money and attention that could have gone into getting very good at one thing. Mastery needs repetition, which is what this facet finds least appealing, so high adventurousness without much Conscientiousness produces a wide, shallow record. In a team, the person who wants a new method every quarter exhausts the people keeping the old one running.

What does low adventurousness look like?

Low scorers are not timid and not incurious. They have found what works and see no reason to keep auditioning replacements.

• You go deep where others go wide, and your favourite things are genuinely known to you.
• You can say precisely why the method you use is the right one.
• Change has to earn its place with you, which saves everyone a good deal of churn.
• Familiar surroundings leave your attention free for the work, the people or the book.

The costs run the other way. A better option can go untried for years because the current one is adequate. Fields and tools move, and a preference for the tested can become a defence of something after the ground beneath it has shifted. And a life built entirely on the familiar can become smaller than the person living it intended, one declined invitation at a time.

What does the research say about adventurousness?

There is far more evidence about Openness as a whole than about this facet, and it is worth being clear about which is which.

• What it is and is not. In the NEO framework this facet covers willingness to try new activities, foods and places rather than a taste for danger (Costa & McCrae, 1992).
• Structure that holds up. The five-factor structure, Openness included, reproduced in observer ratings from fifty cultures (McCrae & Terracciano, 2005), and self-report profiles across fifty-six nations show the same dimensions (Schmitt et al., 2007).
• Why facets are reported at all. Narrower traits add prediction that a broad domain score misses (Soto & John, 2017).
• Learning. In the meta-analysis of the Big Five and job performance, Openness predicted training proficiency across occupations, while Conscientiousness was the only dimension that predicted performance across all of them (Barrick & Mount, 1991).
• Age and inheritance. Across 92 longitudinal samples Openness rose in adolescence and fell again in old age (Roberts et al., 2006), a cross-sectional sample of 132,515 adults found Conscientiousness and Agreeableness still rising through early and middle adulthood (Srivastava et al., 2003), and twin and family studies put the heritability of personality traits at about forty percent (Vukasovic & Bratko, 2015).

These are averages across many people. A score here describes a tendency, not a plan for your next weekend.

How does Wellington measure adventurousness?

Wellington is a science-based personality assessment from Therabot Labs LLC. It measures personality as continuous traits, built on the Big Five and HEXACO models, and writes the results back as a personal report rather than a type.

The free Snapshot is 60 questions, about 7 minutes, across six dimensions: Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability, Openness to Experience, Honesty-Humility, and reports Openness to Experience as a whole rather than its facets. The first ten questions are answered before anything is asked of you; after question ten you sign in with an email address so answers are saved and results can be shown. There is no card.

Adventurousness itself is measured by 7 statements on the same scale, and it is reported in the membership. The Wellington Membership, $4.99 a month, adds the Portrait, 336 questions in 4 chapters, to reach 90 traits including every Big Five facet and all 24 VIA character strengths, then adds a weekly module over 104 weeks toward all 255 traits.

Your score is the average of those statements, set against a reference sample as a percentile and reported in one of three bands: Quiet below the 30th percentile, Balanced to the 70th, High above. Those norms are provisional until the norming sample is complete. The bands and the Portrait names exist to make the result easier to talk about; the percentile is the measurement, and it is always shown alongside. Each band has its own page, written in advance by the writing and psychology team: Quiet is The Deep Root (You know what you love, and you keep returning to it), Balanced is The Measured Wanderer (You like a new door, once you have checked the hinges), High is The Open Road (New is its own reason. You have never needed another). The methodology walks through a worked example and the scoring in full.

Wellington is a wellness tool for reflection, not a medical or psychological diagnosis, and it does not replace care from a qualified professional. It is not built for hiring or selection, and you can export or delete your data at any time.

Questions people ask

Can adventurousness change?

Modestly, and through what you do rather than what you decide. A systematic review found real trait change through intervention, about a third of a standard deviation over roughly six months, largest for Emotional Stability, and drawn mostly from therapy and counselling trials (Roberts et al., 2017). Among people who wanted to change a trait, measured change followed over sixteen weeks, and those who set specific if-then plans changed more than those given general intentions (Hudson & Fraley, 2015).

Is adventurousness the same as being a risk taker?

No. Risk taking is about accepting the chance of loss or harm. This facet is about wanting variety, and the two often travel separately. A person can try a new country, a new cuisine and a new career while being careful with money and unwilling to go near a cliff edge. Taste for intensity and danger sits closer to excitement seeking, a facet of Extraversion.

Why does adventurousness belong to Openness rather than Extraversion?

Because of how the descriptions group when they are analysed. Wanting new experiences travels with curiosity, imagination and aesthetic interest rather than with sociability and assertiveness. In the NEO inventories it is the Openness facet named Actions, and the IPIP scales carry it as Adventurousness. Excitement seeking, which is about intensity rather than novelty, sits under Extraversion.

Does low adventurousness mean a boring life?

No. Low scorers tend to go deep rather than wide: the same city known street by street, one craft practised for twenty years, friendships that were not replaced when something newer appeared. Depth is a different good from variety, not a lesser one. The real cost at this end is a better option going untried because the current one is adequate.