Imagination
A facet of openness to experience. Four items in the IPIP-NEO-120.
The first facet of openness is how much a person lives in fantasy and daydream rather than only in the concrete present: having a vivid imagination, enjoying flights of fancy, and getting lost in thought. It is the inward, make-believe side of openness.
What it does not mean
A high score is not creativity in the sense of making things, and it is not intelligence. Imagining is an activity people enjoy; whether it produces anything depends on other traits, above all conscientiousness. Nor does a high score mean being unrealistic about life.
A low score is not dullness. Low scorers attend to what is in front of them, which is its own strength and the one most work rewards.
Four items make a short scale. A facet score moves more between attempts than the 24-item domain score, and it describes a tendency in ordinary life as the person reports it, not a diagnosis of anything.
High and low in daily life
High. People high on this facet say they have a vivid imagination, enjoy wild flights of fantasy, love to daydream and like to get lost in thought. In daily life that shows as a rich inner life, stories and scenarios running during a dull meeting, a taste for fiction and invented worlds, and the occasional missed stop on the bus.
Low. People low on this facet say they rarely daydream and keep their attention on what is real and present. In daily life that shows as practicality, a preference for facts over fiction, and a mind that stays with the task. Others sometimes wish they would speculate more.
Parent domain
- Openness to experience: the broad trait this facet belongs to, with five sibling facets.
What the research says it predicts
Imagination, artistic interests and emotionality form the openness aspect, which is about aesthetic and sensory engagement, as distinct from the intellect aspect about ideas. (DeYoung, Quilty and Peterson, 2007)
The openness aspect, which includes imagination, predicts creative achievement in the arts, while the intellect aspect predicts it in the sciences. (Kaufman and others, 2016)
Openness is a family of related traits rather than one thing, and different members of the family relate to different outcomes, so a single openness score hides variety that the facets show. (Connelly and others, 2014)
Where people fall
The spread of scores
Curve height shows how common each score is; the darker middle holds half of all people. If you have taken a test on this device, your marker is drawn on.
IPIP-NEO-120, imagination, 4 items
410,376 people
The other facets of openness to experience
Sources and licence
DeYoung, C. G., Quilty, L. C., & Peterson, J. B. (2007). Between facets and domains: 10 aspects of the Big Five. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 93(5), 880-896. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.93.5.880
Kaufman, S. B., Quilty, L. C., Grazioplene, R. G., Hirsh, J. B., Gray, J. R., Peterson, J. B., & DeYoung, C. G. (2016). Openness to experience and intellect differentially predict creative achievement in the arts and sciences. Journal of Personality, 84(2), 248-258. doi:10.1111/jopy.12156
Connelly, B. S., Ones, D. S., Davies, S. E., & Birkland, A. (2014). Opening up openness: A theoretical sort following critical incidents methodology and a meta-analytic investigation of the trait family measures. Journal of Personality Assessment, 96(1), 17-28. doi:10.1080/00223891.2013.809355
Instrument: IPIP-NEO-120. Johnson, J. A. (2014). Measuring thirty facets of the Five Factor Model with a 120-item public domain inventory: Development of the IPIP-NEO-120. Journal of Research in Personality, 51, 78-89. doi:10.1016/j.jrp.2014.05.003 Key: https://ipip.ori.org/30FacetNEO-PI-RItems.htm.
Norms: Johnson, J. A. IPIP-NEO-120 public dataset (IPIP120.dat), OSF component wxvth of osf.io/tbmh5, https://osf.io/wxvth/.
Licence: Public domain (IPIP). Permission is granted automatically for any person to use IPIP items for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial. https://ipip.ori.org/newPermission.htm
Instrument: IPIP Big-Five Factor Markers. Goldberg, L. R. (1992). The development of markers for the Big-Five factor structure. Psychological Assessment, 4(1), 26-42. doi:10.1037/1040-3590.4.1.26 Key: https://ipip.ori.org/newBigFive5broadKey.htm.
Norms: Open-Source Psychometrics Project, IPIP Big-Five Factor Markers responses (IPIP-FFM-data-8Nov2018.zip), 1,015,342 responses collected 2016 to 2018, https://openpsychometrics.org/_rawdata/.
Licence: Public domain (IPIP). Permission is granted automatically for any person to use IPIP items for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial. https://ipip.ori.org/newPermission.htm