What is cultural engagement?

What does cultural engagement mean?

In ordinary use, cultural engagement covers going to things: exhibitions, concerts, a film with subtitles, a neighbourhood you have never walked through. Arts organisations use the phrase to mean participation, and the personality sense keeps that emphasis. It is behavioural. The plain definition is this: you actively seek out art, music, books, and new ideas, and they matter to you. Compressed further, it is a living appetite for art, ideas and the made world, pursued rather than merely admired.

The word actively is doing the work. Most people enjoy a good exhibition once they are inside one; this facet is about who organised the trip. It asks whether your week contains books nobody assigned you, music you went looking for, and customs from outside the tradition you grew up in.

It is not a measure of education, income or class, though all three change how easy engagement is. Someone with a library card and a curiosity about the next street can score high; someone with a season ticket they never use scores low. Nor is it approval of culture: plenty of people believe the arts matter and do nothing about it.

Which personality dimension is cultural engagement part of?

Cultural engagement is a facet of Openness to Experience, the Big Five dimension gathering curiosity, imagination, aesthetic feeling and the pull toward the unfamiliar. The fit is close enough that this dimension was once called Culture, and breadth of interest remains one of its signatures.

The instruments approach it from two directions. The NEO inventories cover the aesthetic half of this ground in the Aesthetics facet (Costa & McCrae, 1992), and the public-domain IPIP pools, which offer open-licence items as an alternative to commercial inventories, label the equivalent Artistic Interests (Goldberg et al., 2006). The BFI-2 names one of its three Openness facets Aesthetic Sensitivity (Soto & John, 2017). Between the domain and its facets sit two aspects, Openness and Intellect, and the pursuit of art, beauty and varied experience belongs to the first (DeYoung et al., 2007).

Wellington scores cultural engagement from that aesthetic and breadth-of-interest tradition, with items about what a person seeks out rather than what they feel. It is one of 13 traits reported beneath Openness to Experience; the hierarchy is in the Big Five facets, explained.

How is cultural engagement different from artistic interests?

This is the pair most often treated as one thing, and the difference is simple: feeling against doing. Artistic interests is responsiveness, how strongly a chord or a building acts on you. Cultural engagement is pursuit, whether you put yourself in the way of those things on an ordinary Wednesday. One is measured in the body, the other in the diary.

They come apart in both directions. A person high on artistic interests and low here is undone by music and never goes to hear any. A person high here and moderate there goes to everything out of appetite for the unfamiliar rather than for the shiver. Two more neighbours: inquisitiveness wants answers rather than experiences, and creativity is production rather than consumption, so a person can visit a hundred exhibitions and make nothing.

What does high cultural engagement look like?

High scorers arrange their own supply of the unfamiliar, and they notice when it runs out.

• You keep a list of things to see, read and hear, and it grows faster than you clear it.
• You would rather try a tradition than read a summary of it.
• You travel toward what is specific to a place rather than toward comfort.
• A month with nothing new in it starts to feel narrow, and you notice.

The costs are practical. Seeking takes time and usually money, and a life with a lot of it in has less room for depth in one thing. Breadth can shade into collecting, where the point becomes having been rather than having taken anything in. And enthusiasm can arrive in someone else's tradition as an audience rather than as a guest.

What does low cultural engagement look like?

Low scorers are not incurious and they are not narrow. Their meaning comes from the real and the near rather than from the made and the represented.

• You go deep in the few things you love rather than wide across many.
• Your enjoyment of a place is the walking, the weather and the people, not its institutions.
• You are hard to impress with novelty, so you rarely spend an evening on something thin.
• You are honest about what you liked, which makes your recommendations worth having.

The costs run the other way. A settled diet of the familiar means fewer chances to be surprised, and ideas from outside your circle arrive later. The remedy, if you want one, is small and specific rather than a resolution to become cultured: one unfamiliar thing a month, chosen by somebody else.

What does the research say about cultural engagement?

Facet-level research is thinner than domain-level research, and much of what is said about arts participation describes populations rather than traits. The trustworthy statements here concern the structure and the parent dimension.

• It belongs to the aesthetic half of Openness. Between domain and facet sit two aspects, Openness and Intellect; the pursuit of art, beauty and varied experience belongs to the first (DeYoung et al., 2007).
• The structure is not local to one culture. Observer ratings collected in fifty cultures reproduced the five-factor model, Openness included (McCrae & Terracciano, 2005).
• Learning and school. Openness predicted training proficiency across occupations in the meta-analysis of the Big Five and job performance, where Conscientiousness predicted performance across all of them (Barrick & Mount, 1991). Academic performance correlated with Openness, Conscientiousness and Agreeableness in a meta-analysis drawing on samples of more than 70,000 (Poropat, 2009).
• It is the most behavioural of the Openness facets. Measured in activity rather than in feeling, it is the facet most exposed to circumstance: time, money, a city with things on.
• Age. Across 92 longitudinal samples Openness rose in adolescence and fell again in old age, while Conscientiousness and Emotional Stability rose mostly between twenty and forty (Roberts et al., 2006). In a cross-sectional sample of 132,515 adults aged twenty-one to sixty, Conscientiousness and Agreeableness were still rising through early and middle adulthood (Srivastava et al., 2003).

How does Wellington measure cultural engagement?

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.

Cultural engagement itself is measured by 6 statements on a five-point accuracy 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 Open Field (You find your meaning in the real, not the represented), Balanced is The Sunday Visitor (Culture is a place you visit, gladly, and then come home), High is The Lit Gallery (The made world is where you feel most alive). 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 cultural engagement change?

More easily than most facets, because it is measured in behaviour. A systematic review of 207 intervention studies found trait change averaging about a third of a standard deviation, largest for Emotional Stability and drawn mostly from therapy and counselling trials (Roberts et al., 2017). In two 16-week experiments, people who wanted to change a trait did shift on it, and those trained to form specific implementation intentions changed more than those given a simpler nudge (Hudson & Fraley, 2015).

Is cultural engagement the same as being cultured?

No. Being cultured usually means knowing the canon, which is education and memory. This facet is about appetite and activity: what you seek out now, in any tradition, including ones nobody calls prestigious. A person who follows a local scene they were not raised in scores high; a person who can name every symphony and hears none scores low.

Does a low score mean you are closed-minded?

No. Open-mindedness is a separate facet about revising your views when evidence arrives, and tolerance is another about accepting people and customs unlike your own. A person can be low on cultural engagement and high on both. This facet only asks how much of your week you spend in the made world of art, books and music.

Is high cultural engagement good for well-being?

It is often assumed so, and the sources behind this page do not test that link. Even where arts participation and well-being go together, the direction is hard to establish, because people who are already well, with time and money to spare, find it easier to take part. Treat it as a reasonable thing to try rather than a settled remedy.