Curiosity is the narrower trait: the appetite for finding things interesting and wanting to know more. Openness to experience is the broad Big Five domain it sits inside, which also covers imagination, feeling for art, emotional depth, a taste for variety and an interest in ideas.
Where the scale comes from
The ten statements are the IPIP curiosity scale, written to match the curiosity strength in the character strengths classification, such as Find the world a very interesting place and Am excited by many different activities, with reversed statements such as Am not all that curious about the world. You rate each on five points, the reversed ones are flipped, and the ten are added, so a score runs from 10 to 50. The IPIP key page gives coefficient alpha of .78 for the scale, so a difference of a point or two between attempts means little. No norms have been published for the scale on its own.
What the research finds
Connelly and colleagues (2014) sorted the many measures in the openness family and found that curiosity and intellectual interest belong to it alongside aesthetics, fantasy and unconventionality, and that the members predict different things. DeYoung, Quilty and Peterson (2007) split the domain into two aspects: openness proper, which is aesthetic and imaginative, and intellect, which is about ideas and understanding. Curiosity straddles both, since the statements ask about the world and about activities as much as about ideas. Kashdan and colleagues (2018) found curiosity itself has five dimensions: joyous exploration, the itch of an unanswered question, the willingness to put up with the discomfort of the new, social curiosity and thrill seeking. The site’s scale is closest to joyous exploration. The willingness to face discomfort is nearer to what the courage test measures.
What it is not
Curiosity is not intelligence. The scale asks how much the world interests you, not how well you understand it, and the two are only loosely related.
It is not the whole of openness. A person can be curious about facts and indifferent to art, or moved by music and uninterested in other countries, and the six facets of the 120-item test separate those.
It is not restlessness or distractibility.
A low score is not dullness. Low scorers tend to have a few deep interests rather than many shallow ones.
What it means for your results
A high score means you find a great deal interesting and are rarely bored; a low score means you have a few settled interests and little appetite for novelty for its own sake. With no norms for the scale alone, the marker shows where your answers fell in the possible range, not where you stand against other people. The 120-item Big Five test scores openness and all six of its facets against a sample of over 400,000 people.
The curiosity test takes two minutes, is scored on your device and shows your score on the strip.