Your openness to the new
Adventure is often imagined as something dramatic: traveling alone, climbing a mountain, moving abroad or doing something physically risky. But most encounters with the unfamiliar are much smaller. You try a restaurant you have never been to, take a class where you know nobody, travel somewhere without planning every detail or say yes to an invitation that falls outside your usual routine.
Bellamy uses Adventure Orientation to describe your openness to unfamiliar experiences and your willingness to move beyond what is already known and predictable. It is not a measure of bravery or how exciting your life looks from the outside. It is concerned with your relationship to novelty, exploration and manageable uncertainty.
What is Adventure Orientation?
Adventure Orientation is a Bellamy construct informed by several established areas of psychological research, including openness to experience, novelty seeking, sensation seeking, curiosity and exploratory behavior.
These concepts overlap but should not be treated as interchangeable. Openness to experience, one of the Big Five personality dimensions, encompasses receptivity to ideas, aesthetics, imagination and experience. Sensation seeking, associated particularly with psychologist Marvin Zuckerman, includes a preference for varied, novel and intense experiences and a willingness to accept some risk in pursuing them. Curiosity research focuses more broadly on the desire to acquire new information and explore, and recent work has separated it into distinct dimensions, including a joyous exploration of the new and a tolerance for the stress that novelty can produce.
Bellamy's Adventure Orientation is narrower in some respects and broader in others. It asks how readily you allow unfamiliar experiences into your actual life, whether those experiences involve travel, people, activities, environments or everyday choices.
Novelty asks something of us
Familiarity reduces uncertainty. You know what to order at your regular restaurant, how your usual workout works and what to expect from people you already know. Familiar routines require less active processing because experience has already given you a map.
Novelty removes some of that map.
You may not know whether you will enjoy the activity, understand the rules, like the people or feel competent. This uncertainty is part of what makes novelty stimulating for some people and uncomfortable for others.
Individual differences matter here. Some people naturally seek stimulation and variety more strongly than others. A meta-analysis of longitudinal studies found that the rank ordering of people on personality traits is meaningfully consistent over time and becomes more so with age, which suggests these dispositions are relatively enduring rather than moods that pass.
A lower desire for novelty is therefore not automatically something to fix. Some people genuinely prefer familiarity, depth and predictability.
The more useful question is whether preference has become restriction.
Adventure does not require risk
Risk and adventure often overlap, but they are not the same thing.
Trying a new cuisine is novel without being particularly dangerous. Joining a book club, learning pottery or exploring a neighborhood you have never visited may involve uncertainty with very little objective risk.
This distinction matters because someone can have a strong Adventure Orientation while having little interest in extreme sport, physical danger or impulsive behavior.
The relevant characteristic is willingness to enter experiences where the outcome is not entirely predetermined.
Adventure can be intellectual, social, physical, cultural or geographical. What counts as adventurous also depends on the person. Going to a party alone may feel ordinary to one person and genuinely challenging to another.
Curiosity can compete with uncertainty
One useful way to understand exploratory behavior is as a tension between two forces.
Something unfamiliar creates uncertainty, but it can also create curiosity.
What would that be like?
Would I enjoy it?
Who would I meet?
Could I learn to do that?
When curiosity is stronger than the desire for certainty, people are more likely to explore. When uncertainty feels more costly, familiar options become more attractive.
Neither response is inherently irrational. Novel experiences can be disappointing, uncomfortable, expensive or genuinely unsafe. Familiar choices often become familiar because they work.
A healthy Adventure Orientation therefore does not mean automatically choosing novelty.
It means being able to consider the unfamiliar without rejecting it simply because it is unfamiliar.
Why novelty can make life feel richer
Novel experiences can contribute to what researchers describe as psychological richness: a life characterized by interesting, complex and perspective-changing experiences.
This connects Adventure Orientation with Bellamy's Lifestyle Richness Signal. New environments, people and activities expose you to information your existing routine cannot provide. Sometimes that information changes your preferences.
You discover that you like something you assumed you would dislike. You find an activity you never expected to become important. You meet someone outside your usual social environment. You visit somewhere that changes how you think about where you want to live.
Exploration is therefore one of the ways people learn about themselves.
You cannot know all of your preferences through introspection alone.
Some require experience.
Familiarity can quietly become a boundary
Routines become self-reinforcing. You return to places you already know you like, spend time with familiar people and choose activities in which you already understand how to behave.
Over time, this can create a comfortable but increasingly narrow range of experience.
The narrowing is not necessarily deliberate. There may never be a moment when someone decides to stop trying new things. Novelty simply becomes less convenient than familiarity.
Adult life can intensify this tendency because time becomes more valuable. When you have only one free evening, taking a chance on something unfamiliar can feel less appealing than choosing something reliably enjoyable.
Adventure Orientation asks whether there is still some room for uncertainty within that efficiency.
Confidence affects willingness to explore
Openness to new experience is partly shaped by whether you trust yourself to handle what happens if the experience does not go well.
Trying something new creates possibilities for awkwardness, incompetence, disappointment and inconvenience. If those outcomes feel highly threatening, predictability becomes more valuable.
Someone with greater confidence in their ability to adapt may be more willing to proceed without knowing exactly what will happen. They do not necessarily believe the experience will go well. They believe they can manage it if it does not.
This is why adventure sometimes becomes easier through experience. Each unfamiliar situation successfully navigated provides evidence that uncertainty is survivable.
What stronger Adventure Orientation can look like
When Adventure Orientation is relatively strong, unfamiliarity often generates at least some interest alongside uncertainty. You are reasonably willing to try activities, enter environments or consider possibilities that fall outside your established routine.
You do not need complete certainty that you will enjoy something before trying it. A disappointing experience can simply be information rather than evidence that taking the chance was a mistake.
You may also tolerate being a beginner relatively well. New experiences frequently involve temporary incompetence and that does not automatically prevent participation.
Importantly, strong Adventure Orientation does not require constant novelty. Familiar rituals and routines can still be deeply valued. The difference is that the familiar has not become the only place where you feel comfortable operating.
What lower Adventure Orientation can look like
Lower Adventure Orientation often appears as a strong preference for predictability. You may choose places you already know, decline activities where you are unsure what to expect or research unfamiliar experiences extensively before committing.
Sometimes this is simply temperament.
At other times, fear has gradually become disguised as preference. You tell yourself you are "just not adventurous" when the more accurate explanation is that you dislike looking inexperienced, being alone, losing control or making a choice you later regret.
That distinction matters.
There is nothing wrong with preferring familiar experiences.
But it is worth knowing whether you are choosing familiarity because you genuinely like it or because uncertainty has become difficult to tolerate.
More adventure is not always better
High Adventure Orientation has its own potential costs.
Novelty can become something people chase compulsively. Familiarity begins to feel boring simply because it is familiar. Commitments become harder to maintain because the next experience always appears more interesting than the current one.
High sensation seeking has also been linked with greater willingness to engage in risky behavior, although adventure and risk-taking are not equivalent.
A satisfying life generally requires both exploration and commitment. You need enough openness to discover possibilities and enough willingness to stay with some of them after the novelty disappears.
Adventure Orientation is therefore not a scale from boring to interesting.
The useful quality is flexibility.
If you want more adventure
You do not need to begin with something dramatic.
The psychological skill involved in adventure can be practiced through small departures from routine: going somewhere alone, trying an unfamiliar class, accepting an invitation you would normally decline, exploring somewhere new or doing something you are curious about despite knowing you may be bad at it.
The important part is the presence of uncertainty.
You are allowing experience to answer a question you cannot answer in advance.
Over time, the objective is not to become fearless. It is to accumulate evidence that unfamiliarity does not always need to be resolved before you proceed.
Something to consider
Think about something you have been curious about but have not tried.
Then ask yourself what is actually stopping you.
Perhaps you genuinely do not want it enough. Perhaps it is too expensive, impractical or risky. Those are useful answers.
But perhaps the obstacle is simply that you do not know what will happen.
Adventure Orientation is not about making your life more dramatic. It is about whether the unknown still has permission to occasionally become part of it.
References
Kashdan, T. B., Stiksma, M. C., Disabato, D. J., McKnight, P. E., Bekier, J., Kaji, J., & Lazarus, R. (2018). The five-dimensional curiosity scale: Capturing the bandwidth of curiosity and identifying four unique subgroups of curious people. Journal of Research in Personality, 73, 130-149. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2017.11.011
McCrae, R. R. (1994). Openness to experience: Expanding the boundaries of Factor V. European Journal of Personality, 8(4), 251-272. https://doi.org/10.1002/per.2410080404
Oishi, S., & Westgate, E. C. (2022). A psychologically rich life: Beyond happiness and meaning. Psychological Review, 129(4), 790-811. https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000317
Roberts, B. W., & DelVecchio, W. F. (2000). The rank-order consistency of personality traits from childhood to old age: A quantitative review of longitudinal studies. Psychological Bulletin, 126(1), 3-25. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.126.1.3
Zuckerman, M., & Kuhlman, D. M. (2000). Personality and risk-taking: Common biosocial factors. Journal of Personality, 68(6), 999-1029. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-6494.00124