Anne-Laure Le Cunff's Tiny Experiments: Two Openness Facets

A small potted seedling beside a notebook and a magnifying glass on a bright windowsill

Anne-Laure Le Cunff's Tiny Experiments makes a quietly radical argument against the tyranny of goals. Instead of setting a fixed target and grinding toward it, she suggests running small experiments: try a thing, watch what happens, follow the curiosity. In her TEDx talk she compresses the whole philosophy into a line: "control keeps you small but curiosity sets you free." It is a message about how to live, and it also happens to describe a Big Five trait doing what it does best.

The experimental mindset is two Openness facets

Two facets carry the mindset Le Cunff is teaching. Intellect (O5) is intellectual curiosity, the pull to ask what if and to find open questions more interesting than settled answers. Adventurousness (O4) is the willingness to actually try the unfamiliar rather than stick with the known. A tiny experiment needs both: the O5 to be curious about an untested option, and the O4 to run it before you are sure it will work. Le Cunff names exactly this tolerance for not-knowing: "They teach you that you can act without knowing the outcome, that you can learn from uncertainty instead of being paralyzed by it."

What is nice about the framing is that it maps onto a real difference in temperament. Rigid, linear goals suit a certain profile: high Conscientiousness, lower Openness, someone energized by a clear target and a plan. Le Cunff's experimental approach fits the opposite pole, high O5 and O4, people who wilt inside a fixed plan and come alive when there is room to explore. Neither is better in the abstract. But if you have ever set a big goal and felt strangely deflated, your Openness may simply be higher than your goal-setting system assumes, and a curiosity-led experiment is what your traits were asking for.

The useful thing Tiny Experiments adds is a method for people high on both facets: stop waiting for a certainty you were never going to get, and let curiosity pick the next small thing to try. If your O5 and O4 run high, that is not indecision so much as the way your particular mind is built to learn. The experiment is not a detour from progress. For this profile it is the road.

Read the book: Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World by Anne-Laure Le Cunff.

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Research Citations

Le Cunff, A. (2025). Tiny experiments: How to live freely in a goal-obsessed world. Avery.

Kashdan, T. B., Rose, P., & Fincham, F. D. (2004). Curiosity and exploration: Facilitating positive subjective experiences and personal growth opportunities. Journal of Personality Assessment, 82(3), 291-305.

Johnson, J. A. (2014). Measuring thirty facets of the Five Factor Model with a 120-item public domain inventory: Development of the IPIP-NEO-120. Journal of Research in Personality, 51, 78-89.

Costa, P. T., & McCrae, R. R. (1992). Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R) professional manual. Psychological Assessment Resources.