Intellect
A facet of openness to experience. Four items in the IPIP-NEO-120.
The fifth facet of openness is enjoyment of ideas: liking challenging reading, abstract and theoretical discussion, and thinking for its own sake. It is the facet of openness most often confused with intelligence, which it is not.
What it does not mean
It is not intelligence. The items ask what a person enjoys and how they see themselves, not how well they reason; the overlap with measured ability is real but modest, and plenty of able people have no taste for theory. A low score says nothing about how clever someone is.
A high score is not wisdom or good judgement. Loving ideas and handling them well are different things.
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 love to read challenging material and enjoy philosophical and theoretical discussions. In daily life that shows as arguments for the fun of it, a shelf of difficult books, curiosity about how things work in principle, and restlessness with talk that stays practical.
Low. People low on this facet say they avoid philosophical discussions and are not interested in theoretical ones. In daily life that shows as a preference for the concrete, questions about what works rather than why, and a tolerance for not knowing the theory behind a thing that works. Many low scorers are expert practitioners.
Parent domain
- Openness to experience: the broad trait this facet belongs to, with five sibling facets.
What the research says it predicts
Intellect is one of the two aspects of openness, distinct from the aesthetic and imaginative aspect, and the one more related to measured ability. (DeYoung, Quilty and Peterson, 2007)
The intellect aspect predicts creative achievement in the sciences, where the openness aspect predicts it in the arts. (Kaufman and others, 2016)
In a meta-analysis of openness measures, the intellect family of traits relates more to measured cognitive ability than the other openness traits do, and the relation is moderate at most. (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, intellect, 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