Two people take the same dose of the same psychedelic, in the same room, on the same night. One sees colours bloom and geometry breathe. The other gets a milder, more muted version of the same trip. Dose was identical. Setting was identical. So what changed?
A new study out of New Zealand suggests that who you are going in shapes what comes out the other side.
The study
Researchers Alexander Boardman, Jai Whelan, and Ryan Ward recruited 426 psychedelic users from Aotearoa New Zealand and asked them to complete an online survey covering their personality and their history with sensory effects during the acute psychedelic state.
Personality was measured two ways: the IPIP-NEO-60, which scores the classic Big Five traits (neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, conscientiousness), and the Tellegen Absorption Scale (TAS), a 34-item measure of how readily someone slips into immersive, altered states of attention, whether that’s getting lost in music, daydreaming vividly, or losing track of time during a film.
Participants then rated the intensity of 20 distinct sensory effects, things like visual trails, objects “breathing,” changes in field of vision, taste hallucinations, out-of-body experiences, and synaesthesia, either from their most intense trip (if they were relatively inexperienced) or their typical trip (if they’d used psychedelics four or more times).
Absorption was the key
Trait absorption correlated significantly with 18 of the 20 sensory effects measured, more than any other personality dimension by a wide margin. The strongest links were with field-of-vision changes, visual acuity changes, experiences of other dimensions or worlds, and synaesthesia, all in the moderate range (r values between 0.30 and 0.35). People high in absorption also reported notably more intense out-of-body experiences, “beautiful” visuals, and olfactory hallucinations.
By contrast, the Big Five traits individually were much weaker predictors. Extraversion came closest to mattering, showing the strongest of the Big Five correlations with gustatory hallucinations, beautiful visuals, and colour enhancement. Openness, despite being theoretically close cousins with absorption, barely registered. Neuroticism, agreeableness, and conscientiousness showed only scattered, weak associations, the kind of small effects you’d expect from noise as much as signal.
When the researchers built regression models combining personality with dose and setting, a clearer hierarchy emerged. Trait absorption showed up in every one of the nine strongest models, the only personality variable to do so consistently. But its contribution was modest next to dose and setting. Typical or intense dose, and factors like whether someone was with a single partner, at a nightclub, or at a festival, carried far more weight.
Why absorption, specifically
Absorption has previously been linked to a greater susceptibility to mystical-type experiences, whether those are triggered by a substance or arise spontaneously, and some evidence connects it to differences in 5-HT2A receptor sensitivity, the same receptor system classical psychedelics act on.
Put another way, absorption may describe a kind of receptivity, a baseline tendency for attention and perception to move fluidly rather than rigidly. In a system already prone to flexible, less filtered processing, an external push from a 5-HT2A agonist may simply travel further.
Caveats
The data is retrospective and self-reported, so recall bias is a real possibility, especially for “most intense” experiences that may have happened years earlier. The design is correlational, not experimental, so none of this establishes that absorption causes more intense effects, only that the two travel together. The sample, while reasonably sized, was drawn from one country and skewed heavily White/European, which limits how far the findings generalise. And the effect sizes, even for absorption, were moderate at best. Setting and dose still did more of the explanatory work than any personality trait.
The authors themselves frame personality less as a direct driver of the acute experience and more as a moderator, something that shapes preferences (who you trip with, where, how much) which then shape the experience indirectly, layered on top of whatever direct effect it might have on the nervous system itself.
Why this matters beyond curiosity
If trait absorption really is one of the more reliable, easily measured predictors of how intensely someone will experience a psychedelic’s sensory effects, it has practical value. It’s a short, simple questionnaire. It doesn’t require a clinical interview or genetic testing. As psychedelic-assisted therapy continues to formalise, tools like this could help practitioners and facilitators set more accurate expectations before a session even starts, distinguishing between someone likely to have a gentle, manageable experience and someone who might need more support to navigate something far more intense.
It’s also a useful reminder for anyone preparing for their own session, in a clinical setting or otherwise: the substance and the dose are only part of the equation. Who you are when you sit down matters too, and that’s not a fixed, immovable fact about you. Attention, absorption, and the capacity to move flexibly through an altered state are all things that can be cultivated with practice and the right preparation, which is exactly the kind of groundwork worth doing before the session, not just during it.
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Study referenced: Boardman, A., Whelan, J., & Ward, R. D. “Personalised Perception: The Effect of Personality on the Sensory Effects of Psychedelics.”
