Do you already know what you're ordering before you sit down, or do you read the whole menu every time even at a restaurant you've been to a dozen times? That small, low-stakes habit is a surprisingly clean proxy for this facet — not because ordering food matters, but because it's one of the few places the underlying preference shows up with nothing else mixed in.
Bearing measures Adventurousness with four items: whether you prefer variety to routine, whether you like to visit new places, whether you're interested in many things, and — reverse-scored — whether you prefer to stick with things you already know. All four point at the same underlying question: given a choice with no real stakes either way, do you default toward the untested option or the familiar one?
The name invites a mix-up worth heading off directly. Adventurousness sounds like it should predict risk-taking — skydiving, quitting a job with no backup plan, gambling more than you can afford to lose. It doesn't. That's a different facet entirely, Excitement-Seeking, which lives under Extraversion and specifically measures the pull toward reckless or thrill-seeking behavior. You can be high in Adventurousness and low in Excitement-Seeking without any contradiction — someone who wants a new experience every weekend but would never bet real money on anything, who tries every restaurant in the neighborhood but wears a seatbelt without thinking about it.
What the trait is actually for
High Adventurousness shows up as a low threshold for boredom with the known — trying the new coffee shop instead of the reliable one, rearranging a familiar routine just to see what changes. It's a hunger for information more than for excitement: the payoff is finding out what the new option is like, not the thrill of not knowing what will happen.
Low Adventurousness isn't the absence of that hunger so much as satisfaction with what's already been tested. Someone low in this trait who found a restaurant they like sees no reason to keep sampling — they already know the answer works, and sampling has a cost even when nothing bad happens.
Where each end pays off
High Adventurousness pays off when the environment genuinely does have better options waiting to be found — a new city, an unfamiliar industry, anywhere the familiar choice hasn't been proven best, just proven adequate. Low Adventurousness pays off when the familiar choice actually is close to optimal and the cost of sampling alternatives outweighs any plausible upside — most weeknight dinners, most established professional relationships, most tools you already know how to use well.
Reading it with the rest of Openness
Adventurousness sits next to Imagination, Artistic Interests, Emotionality, Intellect, and Liberalism in Bearing's report. High Adventurousness and high Intellect together often describe someone who doesn't just try new things but wants to understand why the new thing works differently from the old one.
Adventurousness is one of thirty facets Bearing measures. On its own it's a preference for variety; separated clearly from Excitement-Seeking, it stops being confused with a taste for risk it was never measuring.