HEXACO model
A six-factor model of personality: Honesty-humility, Emotionality, eXtraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness and Openness. It re-cuts agreeableness and neuroticism and adds a dimension for fairness and lack of greed.
What drives it
Gives a cleaner way to identify ethical risk than the Big Five, because it separates 'pleasant to deal with' from 'won't exploit you'. Useful for hiring, choosing partners and judging charming people.
How it shows
Work
The HEXACO lens asks of a colleague: is he fair when nobody is watching (honesty-humility)? Does she get anxious and seek support, or stay detached (emotionality)? Does he forgive and stay patient when wronged (HEXACO agreeableness, which is about anger, not warmth)? Low honesty-humility predicts workplace delinquency, fraud and sexual harassment better than any Big Five trait.
Relationships
Low honesty-humility predicts infidelity, manipulation and materialism in partners. High emotionality shows as anxiety, sentimentality and a need for others' support, without the anger that the Big Five lumps into neuroticism.
Self
Ask whether you would take the extra money if you were certain nobody would ever find out. The honest answer, not the flattering one, is the honesty-humility read.
What tells it apart
Big Five (Five-Factor Model): In the Big Five, short temper sits under neuroticism; in HEXACO it sits under (low) agreeableness, and sentimentality and fear sit under emotionality. If someone is anxious but never angry, HEXACO describes them more precisely.
Dark Triad and Dark Tetrad: The Dark Triad traits share a common core that is almost exactly low honesty-humility; HEXACO measures that core directly in the normal range rather than as a 'dark' add-on.
A test
When assessing someone's trustworthiness, separate the question 'is he pleasant?' from 'does he take more than his share?' and score them independently.
Questions to carry
- Setting aside how pleasant they are, how does this person act when they could take more than their share?
- Whose charm has made me slow to notice how they treat people who can’t help them?
How strong the research is
moderate. Six-factor structure replicates well across many languages; whether it improves on the Big Five depends mainly on the added honesty-humility factor, which consistently adds predictive power for unethical behaviour.
Where it comes from
Kibeom Lee and Michael Ashton, 2004, building on cross-language lexical studies with colleagues
On the family tree: Michael Ashton and Kibeom Lee
Sources
- Kibeom Lee and Michael C. Ashton, Psychometric Properties of the HEXACO Personality Inventory (2004)