Honesty-Humility: The Sixth Factor of HEXACO

Your salary lands in your account with four hundred dollars more than it should. Payroll miscalculated your overtime and so far nobody has noticed.

Emma finds it on Saturday morning while going through her transactions, and at nine on Monday she calls HR. James notices it too, except he leaves the money sitting there. He tells no lies and steals from nobody, he simply waits to see whether anyone works it out. When two months go by without a word from a living soul, he buys a bike with it.

Neither of them broke the law. Both are reliable, both are good at their jobs, and their manager's reviews come out almost identical. What divides them is not intelligence and not conscientiousness, but a trait psychology calls honesty-humility, the one that carries the letter H in the six-factor HEXACO model.

Four sides of one trait

Factor H does not describe a single quality. It covers four related tendencies that stick together far more closely than you would expect, so someone who scores high on one usually scores high on the remaining three as well.

Sincerity here does not mean telling everyone to their face what you think of them. It asks something else: whether getting what you want takes flattery, a polished version of reality or a small piece of manipulation. People high in H can come across as almost boringly direct, because they carry no second layer to work with.

Fairness shows up in the moments when the other side is weaker and will never find out. An inflated invoice sent to a client who does not know the industry. A travel expense nobody audits. A condition buried in a clause you know the other party will not read.

Independence from money and status sounds like a question for millionaires, and yet it gets decided at perfectly ordinary sums. How much do you want the thing that lets other people see what it cost? How much risk will you take on for money you know you do not need? People high in H are rarely poor or ascetic, possessions just do not pull at them hard enough to make them give ground elsewhere. This is the facet that speaks up in decisions where something tangible sits on the table.

Modesty carries a different meaning in this model than the word usually does. It measures neither self-confidence nor shyness. Someone high in H can hold a high opinion of their own abilities and say so out loud. They simply do not conclude that this entitles them to different treatment from everyone else. That is also why low modesty is not the same thing as healthy self-esteem, and why praise will never cure it.

High H shows when nobody is watching

The best test of this trait is a situation with no witnesses. A wallet on the pavement. A broken barrier at the car park. A brief where you could claim a piece of work somebody else did, with no trail leading back to you.

People high in H behave in those moments exactly as they do under supervision. It has little to do with heroism or self-control. Most of them describe never really weighing the option, because they did not register it as an offer in the first place. Where somebody else sees an opportunity, they see a bug in the system.

In daily life it shows in small things. They negotiate less hard than they could. They are reluctant to sell themselves and in an interview will sooner mention what they still cannot do. They make promises carefully, because they assume they will have to keep them. And when credit gets divided in a team, they tend to step back even when they did the most work.

That last sentence hints that high H comes at a price. Anyone who cannot press their own claim ends up with a smaller share, and over the years it adds up. For comparable work they negotiate a lower reward, simply because they never ask for more. On top of that comes a tendency to believe in good intentions longer than is reasonable. Cheated people high in H often defend the other side by insisting it must have been an honest mistake.

Low H up close

Describing low H as a character flaw would be convenient and inaccurate. Look at how it actually plays out and you see a different approach to people rather than ill will.

The foundation is strategic thinking: other people register as part of an equation, not only as company. In any dealing you have in mind what this person needs to hear in order to meet you halfway. Add a sense of entitlement, the quiet assumption that your situation is exceptional and the usual rule does not quite fit it. And often a talent for charm, which people low in H use completely naturally and without guilt.

The combination has genuine advantages. Less money gets left on the table in negotiations. Someone like this reads office politics faster than the rest and can name who really decides what. They are not afraid to ask for a promotion, a higher price or an exception, and when something new is getting off the ground, their willingness to push at the limits is often what keeps the project alive. Work on first impressions also finds, again and again, that in the opening weeks such people come across as more confident and more interesting than their modest colleagues. The ratings fall only later, as shared experience accumulates.

Low H is not a diagnosis either. It sits on a scale where most people land somewhere in the middle, not in sharply separated categories. Only at the extreme end does it overlap with something more serious: in 2005 Kibeom Lee and Michael Ashton compared Machiavellianism, narcissism and psychopathy against both personality models and found that in HEXACO what binds the three together is above all low H, while in the five-factor model they scatter across several different scales. Where exactly the line runs between healthy drive and something that damages the people around you is unpacked in the piece on low honesty-humility and the dark triad.

Why you will not find this trait in the Big Five

The Big Five was not designed at a desk. It grew out of the lexical hypothesis, the idea that every important difference between people eventually settles into everyday language. Researchers took a dictionary, pulled out the adjectives describing character, had large samples of people rate them and looked at which ones clustered together. In English, five clusters kept coming out.

Things got interesting when the same procedure was repeated elsewhere. In 2004 Michael Ashton, Kibeom Lee and their colleagues summarised lexical studies from seven languages, among them Korean, Hungarian, Italian, Polish and German. Across all of them six clusters appeared instead of five, and the sixth revolved around words like sincere, honest, greedy, boastful and hypocritical. In English it blended into the other factors quietly enough for earlier analyses to miss it.

So where did the content of factor H go in the Big Five? It dissolved, mostly into agreeableness. The trouble is that agreeableness in the five-factor model mixes two different things: whether you are warm towards people and whether you also refrain from exploiting them. That is how someone can come out as remarkably agreeable and still deal with you purely instrumentally, as long as they do it with a smile. HEXACO pulls the two apart, even at the cost of its own agreeableness meaning something else, mainly patience, gentleness and a capacity to forgive. Six factors are therefore not five factors plus one extra, the whole system of axes has rotated; the overview of what HEXACO is goes into more detail.

Trust at work and at home

On ordinary job performance factor H has little influence. Where it comes fully into play is the grey zone, the situations no policy covers. Low H turns up repeatedly in research on counterproductive behaviour at work, from minor rule-bending to taking credit for results somebody else produced. For an employer it is one of the few personality dimensions that says something about risk rather than about ability.

Laura runs a five-person sales team and twice in a row she hired the most eloquent candidate in the process. Both crushed their numbers in the first quarter. Both were gone within a year, leaving behind clients holding signed contracts full of promises nobody could keep, and colleagues who discovered their own deals had appeared in the reports under someone else's name. The third time she picked a person who came across as noticeably less certain in the interview. A year on, he has the lowest number of new contracts and the highest proportion of clients who stayed.

In relationships H surfaces with an even longer delay. Falling in love rewards confidence, charm and grand gestures, which are precisely the things low H excels at. Fairness, by contrast, stays invisible until a situation arrives where something could be gained at your expense. Splitting money. An illness nobody enjoys. A break-up that reveals whether the other person is fighting for themselves or against you.

Work on couples also suggests that in honesty-humility people pick partners similar to themselves more strongly than on other traits. A pair where one plays it safe and the other plays for advantage sooner or later reaches a subject that cannot be split down the middle. With taste or temperament the differences can be sanded down; here one of the two gives ground every single time.

When did you last have the chance to gain something quietly, with nobody ever finding out? Try to recall the specific situation, and above all what you did, not what you like to think about yourself. The answer to that question usually says more than any list of values.

How to find out where you stand

With a questionnaire that asks about fairness and greed, you expect everyone to lie. The strange part is that in an ordinary setting this happens far less than you would predict. People lower in H mostly see nothing problematic in their answers. It strikes them as obvious that a person looks after themselves first, and they answer accordingly. It is different where a job or money is at stake; as soon as the result decides something, self-report stops holding, and no test of this kind belongs in a hiring process.

Our HEXACO test has 60 questions and takes around eight minutes. Besides H you get the remaining five factors, a comparison with the Big Five and a breakdown of what your particular combination means in practice. The comparison with other people is approximate, as with any questionnaire of this type.

Alongside a result, one less comfortable method is worth the effort. Ask two people who have seen you in a situation where you could have gained at someone else's expense how you behaved. Not your partner and not your best friend, their bias runs in your favour. A former colleague, or someone you once split money with, will see the things your memory has mercifully dropped.

And if the description of low H brought a particular person's name to mind and not for one second your own, that is worth sitting with. This is exactly how the trait works from the inside: other people's strategising is conspicuous, your own looks like common sense.