As the year’s main travel season begins, those of us who are packing our suitcases and checking our travel documents begin to exercise a key dimension of our personalities.
Travel requires a degree of openness to experience, which is one of what Psychology 101 calls the Big Five dimensions to personality.
Most people I encounter rank fairly high in this trait. They enjoy trying new things, eating foods they’re tasting for the first time, testing the waters, meeting new people and following paths they have never walked before.
They tend to be curious about what’s over the horizon, and are likely to poke any button and yank any chain just to see what happens.
But when we surround ourselves with people who relish adventure and novelty, our world — paradoxically — can narrow. When those around us are similarly high in certain personality traits and share similar values, a bubble of similarity forms around us, affecting our perspective and restricting our experience — the opposite of what travel is supposed to do.
Until we encounter someone from the other end of the spectrum. I met such a person a couple of years back. She spoke wistfully and often of going to Paris some day.
At first, when I knew her just well enough to know she had a steady well-paying job with lots of vacation time, no major debts and no kids, my reaction was: “What’s stopping you? Go!”
Then she confided that she feared flying, became claustrophobic inside most enclosed spaces, experienced extreme discomfort on water and suffered high anxiety among crowds or strangers. She also disliked most foods except those she grew up on. She had never been farther east than Vegreville, Alta., farther south than Victoria or farther north than Prince George.
On the open-to-experience personality scale, she sat firmly at the far, almost horizontal left end of the bell curve. She was the near-antithesis of adventurous — a dyed-in-the-wool homebody.
And, hey, why not? It takes all sorts to make the world the diverse, fascinating place it is.
Her wistfulness about Paris stemmed from knowing she was unlikely ever to feel comfortable enough with the thought of encountering the unfamiliar that is integral to travelling to ever see the Eiffel Tower in person. She acknowledged that she was a person who would probably enjoy the City of Lights much more from the familiar comfort of her living room than trying to negotiate le métro or the purchase of the morning’s café and bread herself.
Everybody has different tolerances for adventure. And, just as everybody travels for different reasons, travel means different things to different people. In this person’s case, travel represents a barrier that is, for her, as physical as it is psychological.
It turns out combinations of personality traits influence the travel choices of those who do pack up and go. In 2013, German researchers determined, for instance, that people who choose to study abroad tend to be higher in extroversion, the Big-Five personality trait that thrives on social interaction and attention, than those who did not.
Students who travel for just one semester tend to score higher in conscientiousness, the trait that reflects a need to follow rules and to complete tasks, than those who did not travel. And those who took off for an entire year tend to score high in openness to experience compared to those who stayed home.
The researchers found travel left its mark. On their return home, those who travel tend to show small but significant increases in openness, agreeableness — reflecting a need to get along with other people — and emotional stability compared to those who stayed put.
Other studies indicate that living abroad in another culture increases, not surprisingly, our ability to deal with the unexpected and be adaptable to life’s daily stresses. Putting ourselves in environments where people do things differently can also lead to increased empathy and greater creativity — it expands our understanding of why people do what they do and our ability to make unusual connections between ideas and information.
Whether we venture forth or stay close to home, the choice — and preference — both is triggered by key aspects of our personalities and further develops them.
