What Is HEXACO? The Six-Factor Personality Model

The invoice went out twice and the client paid both copies. The gap is nine hundred dollars, and so far nobody has noticed it on the statement.

James spots it on Tuesday evening. By morning he has written to the bookkeeper asking her to send the money back, with a line saying the mistake came out of their own system. Daniel, in the same chair, would keep quiet. He would not be stealing anything, he would simply do nothing and leave it to the other side. Yet both of them show up on time, both finish what they promise, and both get solid reviews from their manager.

Describe these two men with the five traits of the Big Five model and they come out almost identical. The difference that surfaced on Wednesday morning does not fit into those five numbers. It is exactly why HEXACO has six factors.

Six lines along which people differ

HEXACO is a personality model that describes a person through six broad traits. The letters in the name are the initials of those factors in English and at the same time a nod to a hexagon: Honesty-Humility, Emotionality, eXtraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Openness to Experience.

What the model does not do matters just as much. It will not hand you a type or a labeled box. Each of the six traits is a scale, and you lie somewhere between its two ends, in the vast majority of cases closer to the middle than to either edge. The output is therefore not one word but six numbers, and only the balance between them means anything.

Every factor also breaks down into four narrower aspects called facets. Two people with equally high conscientiousness can be very different: one keeps an immaculate calendar, the other works from dawn to dusk and then spends twenty minutes looking for a contract. The broad trait shows the direction, the facets tell you which road it takes.

A trait is not a mood, nor a single piece of behavior. After three sleepless nights you will act unpleasantly even if your agreeableness came out high. The model describes where you return to once the pressure eases, not what you do in the worst hour of the month.

One more thing. No end of any scale is the right one. Low emotionality is priceless in a paramedic and high emotionality at the bedside of someone who is dying. High openness helps when something new has to be invented, low openness when a safety procedure has to be followed to the letter. Six numbers are not a report card.

The six letters and what sits underneath them

Five of the six will probably feel familiar, because other personality models know them in a similar shape. H is the new one, and it is worth staying with for a moment.

High honesty-humility means four things at once: you say things straight even when flattery would serve you better, you do not use other people for your own gain, luxury as proof of success does not pull at you, and you have no sense of being owed special treatment. A low score does not make anyone a criminal. Most people in the lower half of the scale will never steal a thing, they just move through the gray zone a little more comfortably: they flatter a boss they think nothing of, they bend a rule when the advantage is big enough and the risk small, and in an argument they reach for a point they do not believe themselves.

There is another way to read the result than letter by letter. Combinations are what decide. High extraversion together with high H produces someone who holds a whole room and still does not massage the numbers. The same extraversion with low H looks identical from the outside, right up to the moment money is involved. Your lowest number is nearly as useful, because it points at the situations where every step costs you more energy than it costs the people around you. Someone with agreeableness at the bottom settles disputes fast and often more sharply than necessary. Someone with emotionality at the bottom walks through a crisis calmly and cannot grasp why everyone else is suffering.

What else fits under this factor, and how it shows up in an ordinary week, is covered in a separate piece on what honesty-humility actually measures.

How the sixth factor was found in a dictionary

Behind the whole model sits an idea known as the lexical hypothesis. It sounds surprisingly plain: whatever matters about people over the long run, language gives a name to. So if you want to know how people really differ, you do not have to invent a theory. You take a dictionary and count which adjectives travel together.

That is exactly how the researchers went about it. They pulled hundreds of character-describing words out of a language, had large groups rate themselves and their acquaintances, and then looked for the words that clustered. In English, through the 1980s and 1990s, five groups came out again and again, known today as the Big Five. The job looked finished.

Then somebody ran the same method on other languages. In Korean, Hungarian, Italian, Dutch, Polish, French and German, a sixth group of words kept speaking up, one that refused to fit inside the five: sincere, greedy, conceited, hypocritical, modest. The Canadian psychologists Michael Ashton and Kibeom Lee pulled those findings together and, from the turn of the millennium, published them as a six-factor structure; their review across seven languages appeared in 2004.

Here is the counterintuitive part. Nobody was looking for a sixth factor and it did not grow out of any theory about morality. It fell out of counting words, largely because the field finally stopped leaning on English alone. When the English adjective list was later broadened, honesty-humility spoke up there too. Ashton and Lee summarized the model for a wider audience in 2012 in the book The H Factor of Personality.

Where HEXACO and the Big Five part company

You might assume HEXACO is the Big Five with one extra scale. It is not. Adding the sixth factor moved two of the original ones as well.

Anger shows this best. In the five-factor account, a short temper and irritability belong under neuroticism, which is to say under emotional instability. HEXACO moves them elsewhere: whoever blows up over a trifle has low agreeableness. What remains for emotionality is worry, anxiety, sensitivity and the need for someone to lean on. You can therefore be a person who is afraid of flying, cries at movies and has not raised their voice in ten years.

The second shift concerns what hides behind the word "nice". The Big Five mixes kindness and not exploding into a single scale. HEXACO keeps those two questions apart. Agreeableness answers what you do when someone has wronged you. Honesty-humility answers what you do when there is something to gain at another person's expense and nobody is watching.

In practice the gap between them is wide. A person high in H and low in A returns the overpayment and then tells you flatly what they think of your bookkeeping. A person low in H and high in A is pleasant to everyone, never picks a fight, and quietly cuts themselves a slice along the way. A detailed comparison of both models, including when each one is the better choice, is in the piece on HEXACO vs. the Big Five.

The remaining three factors overlap fairly faithfully. Extraversion, conscientiousness and openness mean roughly the same thing in both models, so if you know your Big Five scores you already hold a large part of the result.

When the sixth number is worth knowing

HEXACO pays off most where behavior has consequences. The research line around Ashton and Lee repeatedly finds a link between low honesty-humility and things nobody wants at work: cheating in experiments, working around rules, acting at the expense of colleagues. What is interesting is that conscientiousness does not catch this difference. A careful, reliable person can be exactly as fair as it happens to suit them.

The same factor turns up in another context. When psychologists asked what Machiavellianism, narcissism and psychopathy have in common, the answer read as if it had been copied from HEXACO: the shared core of the so-called dark triad sits very close to the bottom end of the H scale.

In private life the more useful pair tends to be E and A. Take Emma and Nathan. When the car breaks down three days before their vacation, Emma lies awake half the night talking through every option out loud. Nathan considers that pointless drama and deals with it in the morning with one call to the shop. Emma reads this as proof that he does not care about anything, Nathan reads it as proof that she cannot be reasoned with. Neither of them is weak or unfeeling. They differ on one number and have been arguing about it for fifteen years.

Beyond self-knowledge and relationships, the six factors come in handy in a few more situations:

• Putting a team together, when you want to know what nobody in it will keep an eye on, because everyone has conscientiousness and openness set the same way.
• Conversations about money, splitting bonuses or dividing shares. Differences in H surface there sooner than anywhere else.
• Understanding why work you are objectively good at drains you. The cause is often not incompetence but a trait dragged into a situation that does not suit it.
• Feedback, because the same sentence lands completely differently on someone high in agreeableness and on someone who takes every remark as an attack.

What does this look like in practice? A small company hires a salesman who lights up the room in the interview and closes more deals than anyone else on the team in his first quarter. A year later it turns out half of his clients are leaving, because he promised them things the product cannot do. Nobody lied in any contract, it simply paid to overstate a little in every single call. In hindsight that combination is easy to name: plenty of X, not much H. In advance it is not, and that is precisely why an interview reliably rewards a person like this and why the difference only appears once the count switches from new contracts to renewed ones.

When was the last time you could have gained something at someone else's expense with no chance of ever being found out? And what settled it then, the risk or something else? If you want to know where you sit on those six scales, our HEXACO test has 60 questions and takes around eight minutes.

Where the model runs out

The first limit is the measurement itself. You answer about yourself, so the result is your own testimony rather than an observation. With five of the factors that mostly does no harm. With honesty-humility it does a great deal, because it is the most transparent of the six: anyone can tell which answer looks better. The moment the result carries consequences, in a hiring process for instance, the numbers shift. Using HEXACO as a lie detector on candidates therefore makes no sense.

The second limit is breadth. Six factors are a convenient overview, but they average out details that matter in everyday life. Two identical openness scores can belong to a person who reads philosophy and hates a change of menu, and to one who does not read at all and moves country every year.

The model also describes rather than explains. It tells you how people differ from each other and by how much, but it will not answer why your result came out the way it did or what to do about it. Traits shift slowly over time, in years rather than months, so the result is a snapshot, not a verdict.

Nor is expert agreement complete. Some psychologists still argue that the five-factor solution is enough and that honesty-humility is only a marginal part of agreeableness. The dispute is fought over data from individual languages and it is not over. Anyone claiming that six is definitively right is getting ahead of the evidence.

And one last thing: HEXACO is not diagnostics. It says nothing about mental health, it does not belong in a consulting room, and it should never be the only criterion when decisions about people are made. Treat comparisons with others as approximate rather than as an exact placement in the population.

Before you fill in any questionnaire

Try one exercise. Pick three people you know well and guess just two things about each: how they react when someone wrongs them, and what they do when there is something to gain and nobody is checking. With the first person it will come almost by itself. With the third you will probably find that what you actually know about them is mainly how pleasant they are. That is the exact point where five factors stop being enough.