Sociosexuality and Openness to Experience

September 14, 2026 · 5 min read

What Is Sociosexuality, Briefly?

Sociosexuality refers to individual differences in the willingness to engage in sexual activity outside of a committed relationship. The Sociosexual Orientation Inventory–Revised (SOI-R) breaks this broad construct into three distinct facets: Behavior (past uncommitted sexual encounters), Attitude (comfort with and positive evaluation of casual sex), and Desire (frequency of sexual thoughts about people outside a current relationship). Each facet captures something meaningfully different, and they do not always move together within a person. You can explore your own profile by taking the sociosexuality quiz.

Understanding how sociosexuality relates to other well-established personality dimensions helps situate it within the broader landscape of human individual differences. One such relationship—between sociosexuality and the Big Five trait of Openness to Experience—is conceptually rich and worth examining carefully.

What Openness to Experience Describes

Openness to Experience is one of the five major dimensions of personality captured by the Big Five framework. People high in Openness tend to be imaginatively engaged with ideas and aesthetics, curious about novelty, tolerant of ambiguity, and willing to question conventional norms and assumptions. They tend to approach unfamiliar experiences with interest rather than discomfort.

Facets within Openness can include openness to fantasy, to feelings, to actions (a preference for variety and novelty in daily life), to ideas, and to values—including cultural and social norms around relationships and sexuality. That last facet, openness to values, reflects a readiness to reconsider traditional standards, which is where a conceptual connection to sociosexuality begins to take shape.

The Conceptual Overlap with SOI-R Attitude

Of the three SOI-R facets, Attitude is the one most closely aligned, conceptually, with what Openness to Experience measures. The Attitude facet asks whether a person views casual sexual encounters as acceptable, enjoyable, and not inherently problematic. This is, at its core, an evaluative stance—a way of appraising a class of experiences and behaviors.

Openness to Experience, particularly the openness-to-values and openness-to-actions subfacets, similarly reflects a non-judgmental, curious orientation toward experiences that fall outside conventional expectations. Someone high in Openness is, almost by definition, less likely to apply rigid moral templates to novel or non-normative situations. A person who scores high on the Attitude facet of the SOI-R is expressing something structurally similar: that casual sex, as a category of experience, is not inherently objectionable.

Both constructs share a common thread of psychological liberalism—a willingness to engage with the world as it is rather than filter it through inherited prescriptions about how it ought to be. The SOI-R statistics page illustrates how Attitude scores can vary substantially across populations, in ways that parallel how Openness distributions tend to shift with education level, cultural context, and age.

Important Caveats and Distinctions

Recognizing conceptual overlap is not the same as claiming the two constructs are redundant, and several important caveats apply here.

First, Attitude is domain-specific. Openness to Experience is a broad, cross-domain disposition. A person high in Openness might be deeply curious about philosophy, music, and foreign cultures while holding fairly conventional views about sexual relationships. The SOI-R Attitude facet is targeted precisely at sexual attitudes; it does not generalize across domains the way Openness does. High Openness is neither necessary nor sufficient for a high Attitude score.

Second, the other SOI-R facets diverge from Openness meaningfully. The Behavior facet reflects what someone has actually done, shaped by opportunity, relationship history, and circumstance—not just how open-minded they are. The Desire facet reflects the frequency of spontaneous sexual thoughts, which is more closely tied to general sexual interest and drives than to any disposition toward novelty or norm-questioning. Collapsing all three facets into a single sociosexuality score—as older single-item or global measures did—would obscure these distinctions and inflate any apparent relationship with Openness.

Third, correlation does not resolve causality or mechanism. Even where Attitude and Openness align in a given person, it is not straightforward to determine whether a generally open personality predisposes someone to relaxed sexual attitudes, whether comfort with sexual diversity reflects back onto broader personality self-perception, or whether some third set of factors—developmental, cultural, or neurobiological—shapes both independently.

Finally, valence matters. Openness is typically framed as a neutral or positive trait in personality research. Sociosexuality, including the Attitude facet, is explicitly non-judgmental in the SOI-R framework: higher scores do not indicate better or worse outcomes, only different orientations. Importing evaluative assumptions from one domain into the other risks distorting both.

Why the Distinction Matters

Careful attention to which facet of sociosexuality is under discussion—and how it maps onto related constructs like Openness—keeps research and self-understanding precise. People are not simply "open" or "closed" in some global sense. The SOI-R was designed precisely to resist that kind of flattening, offering a differentiated picture of how sexual attitudes, behaviors, and desires can each tell a distinct story about a person.

References

Penke, L., & Asendorpf, J. B. (2008). Beyond global sociosexual orientations: A more differentiated look at sociosexuality and its effects on courtship and romantic relationships. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95, 1113–1135.