Openness to experience and museum visits: Intellectual curiosity, aesthetic sensitivity, and creative imagination predict the frequency of visits to different types of museums

Museum visits have the potential to fascinate and inspire. Openness to experience is known to be related to people’s preferences regarding cultural activities such as visits to different types of museums. This study investigated how facets of openness to experience are related to the frequency of visits to different types of museums in a large sample of 4,541 museum visitors. Modeling facets of openness using the bifactor S − 1 model, we found that aesthetic sensitivity, intellectual curiosity, and creative imagination had differential associations with the frequency of visits to different types of museums. Our findings contribute to the understanding of how people behave in everyday environments and link personality to real-world behavior, highlighting the importance of personality facets.