L’hypothèse selon laquelle les relations bien établies entre le trait de personnalité « ouverture à l’expérience » et les habiletés cristallisées seraient l’unique expression des relations entre le trait de personnalité ouverture et les habiletés fluides a été mise a l’épreuve. Cent soixante-quatre participants, âgés de 18 à 96ans, ont rempli le questionnaire d’ouverture à l’expérience et plusieurs tests d’intelligence fluide et d’intelligence cristallisée. Après considération du pouvoir explicatif des habiletés fluides dans la variabilité observée au sein des habiletés cristallisées, le trait de personnalité ouverture ne prédisait en rien le facteur d’intelligence cristallisée. La relation entre l’ouverture à l’expérience et la cognition semble être d’une autre nature que le simple reflet d’une relation entre activités et acquisition de connaissances.

Previous investigations of the relations between the Big Five personality traits and cognitive abilities have consistently supported that higher levels of openness to experience are associated with higher levels of crystallized abilities or knowledge. However, consistent with the idea that crystallized abilities are the product of the exercise of fluid abilities in the past, a moderately strong correlation between both types of abilities is generally found. Then, the first purpose of the current project was to examine the role of fluid abilities in the relation between openness to experience and crystallized abilities. It aimed at determining whether the relation of openness to crystallized abilities was still significant after controlling for the specific contribution of fluid intelligence to crystallized abilities; or conversely, whether this relation was explained by the relation of openness to fluid intelligence. The second purpose was to determine if the relation of openness to experience to both fluid and crystallized abilities varied as a function of age. The possibility that openness to experience differentially contributes to the variance in fluid and crystallized abilities as a function of age was examined. One hundred and sixty-four participants, aged 18 to 96, completed the openness to experience scale (French version of the IPIP, Goldberg, 1999Goldberg L.R. A broad-bandwidth, public domain personality inventory measuring the lower-level facets of several five-factor models Tilburg, the Netherlands: Tilburg University Press (1999).  p. 7–28.

Cliquez ici pour aller à la section Références. Personality psychology in Europe), in addition to several tests of fluid and crystallized abilities. After controlling for the variance associated with fluid abilities in crystallized abilities, Openness to experience was not related to crystallized abilities anymore. Moreover, the contribution of the personality trait of Openness to the variation in fluid and crystallized intelligences was similar at different ages in adulthood. Several possible interpretations and their respective implications are discussed. First, people more open may exercise fluid abilities more than people who are less open, and then increase the efficiency of these abilities. Second, fluid abilities may influence the development of the personality trait of openness to experience, that is people’s tendency to seek out for novelty and curiosity. And third, the openness to experience scale may only reflect people’s self-assessments of their abilities, such as a self-assessed intelligence construct. In any case, our results strongly suggest that the openness-cognition relation reflects something different from a relation between activity and knowledge acquisition.