The study of trait curiosity — individual differences in curious thoughts, feelings, and actions — sorts into two approaches. One looks downward by unpacking and differentiating trait curiosity, with an emphasis on curiosity’s facets, kinds, and parts. Another looks upward by locating trait curiosity within the larger structure of global personality traits. This article reviews research that looks upward by locating curiosity within modern models of Openness to Experience. Our review indicates (1) that most — but not all — models of Openness to Experience explicitly include curiosity-related facets, and (2) that they tend to favor curiosity’s academic and intellectual forms. In accordance with recent network-psychometric analyses, we propose that a broader sense of curiosity — captured by intellectual curiosity, intellectual interests, and variety seeking — emerges from a large pool of Openness to Experience inventories, and that these curiosity facets are central to the global trait. The literature that looks upward at curiosity would benefit from connecting to the diverse and expansive literature that looks downward at it, and network science models offer a fruitful strategy for building a hierarchical model of curiosity across these levels of abstraction.
