Research instrument
HEXACO
HEXACO Personality Inventory-Revised
The Big Five plus a sixth factor for honesty and humility, which turns out to be the dimension that predicts who exploits other people.
Why that grade: The six-factor structure was recovered in independent lexical studies across multiple languages, and the added factor demonstrably predicts variance the Big Five leaves on the table.
- Cost
- Free
- Time
- 15-25 min
- Items
- 100
- Published
- 2004
The HEXACO-PI-R is published in 200-item, 100-item, and 60-item forms. The 100-item form is the usual choice for individual use.
Publisher
Kibeom Lee and Michael C. AshtonOrigin
Kibeom Lee and Michael C. Ashton
What you get free: All forms are free for research and personal use through the authors’ site, which also returns your scores immediately.
The verdict
The strongest instrument on this site for anyone who has already done the Big Five and wants the piece it leaves out. Free, well-evidenced, and unfashionable, which is a combination worth taking advantage of.
Strengths
- Measures something the Big Five genuinely misses. Honesty-Humility is not a repackaging of Agreeableness, and it earns its place empirically.
- Free, immediate scoring, and no account required.
- Moving anger from Neuroticism to the low end of Agreeableness produces a cleaner and more intuitive Agreeableness factor than the Big Five version.
- Backed by the same class of cross-language lexical evidence that gave the Big Five its authority.
Limitations
- Far less known outside academia, so your result will not connect you to a community or a shared vocabulary the way a four-letter type will.
- Honesty-Humility is the most obviously socially desirable scale in common use, which makes it the easiest to distort if you have any incentive to.
- Because it reallocates content between factors, HEXACO scores are not interchangeable with Big Five scores despite the overlapping names.
- The site is an academic one. Expect scores and a scoring key, not a designed report.
The case for a sixth factor
The Big Five came out of lexical studies, and so did HEXACO. The difference is which studies. When later researchers ran the same procedure across a wider set of languages, including several where the earlier work had not been done, a sixth cluster kept appearing: words about sincerity, fairness, modesty, and the absence of greed. It was not a slice of Agreeableness. It stood on its own.
That is the entire argument, and it is a strong one, because it is the same argument that established the five in the first place. If lexical recovery across languages is what makes the Big Five credible, then the same method finding a sixth factor has to be taken seriously.
Why Honesty-Humility matters more than it sounds
The Dark Triad, meaning narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy, is awkward to locate in the Big Five. It smears across low Agreeableness and low Conscientiousness without ever sitting anywhere cleanly. In HEXACO it has an address: the low end of Honesty-Humility.
This has practical consequences. If you care about who will cut corners, exploit a position, or take advantage of trust, HEXACO measures that more directly than any Big Five inventory does. It is also, for exactly that reason, the scale you should be most sceptical of when someone has an incentive to score well on it.
What it reports back
Results are expressed as continuous traits.
- Honesty-Humility
- Sincerity, fairness, greed avoidance, and modesty. The factor that separates HEXACO from the Big Five, and the one that does most of its predictive work.
- Emotionality
- Fearfulness, anxiety, dependence, and sentimentality. Overlaps Big Five Neuroticism but excludes anger, which HEXACO moves to Agreeableness.
- eXtraversion
- Social self-esteem, boldness, sociability, and liveliness.
- Agreeableness
- Forgiveness, gentleness, flexibility, and patience. Its low end is anger rather than coldness.
- Conscientiousness
- Organisation, diligence, perfectionism, and prudence.
- Openness to Experience
- Aesthetic appreciation, inquisitiveness, creativity, and unconventionality.
The evidence, with sources
Nothing in this section is stated without an attribution. Where a figure varies by version or sample, the range is given rather than the most flattering number.
Reliability
Lee and Ashton report acceptable internal consistency for all six scales across the 200-, 100-, and 60-item forms, with reliability falling as expected on the shorter forms.
peer reviewedLee & Ashton (2004), Multivariate Behavioral Research, 39(2), 329-358The 60-item HEXACO-60 retains adequate scale reliabilities and its intended six-factor structure in both self- and observer-report samples.
peer reviewedAshton & Lee (2009), Journal of Personality Assessment, 91(4), 340-345
Validity
The six-factor solution was independently recovered in lexical studies of personality vocabulary across a range of unrelated languages, which is the same kind of evidence that established the Big Five.
peer reviewedAshton, Lee, Perugini, Szarota, de Vries, Di Blas, Boies & De Raad (2004), Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 86(2), 356-366Low Honesty-Humility accounts for the shared core of the Dark Triad traits, and predicts exploitative and counterproductive behaviour beyond what the Big Five explains.
peer reviewedLee & Ashton (2005), Personality and Individual Differences, 38(7), 1571-1582
Who it actually fits
- Readers who already know their Big Five profile and want the dimension it omits
- Anyone interested in the ethics-and-exploitation end of personality
- Researchers studying counterproductive or antisocial behaviour
Not a diagnosis