HEXACO is a six-factor model of personality that measures who you are across six broad dimensions: Honesty-Humility, Emotionality, eXtraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Openness to Experience. The name is an acronym built from the first letter of each trait. Developed by psychologists Michael Ashton and Kibeom Lee around the year 2000, HEXACO emerged from studies of personality-describing words across multiple languages and cultures. Its biggest distinction from the more familiar Big Five personality model is the addition of Honesty-Humility as a standalone trait, which captures tendencies toward fairness, modesty, and sincerity that older models folded into other dimensions or missed entirely.
The Six Personality Dimensions
Honesty-Humility is the trait that sets HEXACO apart. People who score high on this dimension avoid manipulating others for personal gain, feel little temptation to break rules, have limited interest in lavish wealth, and don’t feel entitled to special social status. Low scorers tend to flatter others strategically, bend rules for personal profit, chase material gain, and carry a strong sense of self-importance. This dimension breaks down into four narrower facets: sincerity (being genuine rather than calculated in relationships), fairness (avoiding fraud and corruption), greed avoidance (indifference to luxury and status symbols), and modesty (seeing yourself as an ordinary person rather than someone deserving special treatment).
Emotionality covers how strongly you experience fear, anxiety, dependence on others, and emotional sensitivity. High scorers feel vulnerable in dangerous situations, worry more, need emotional support from people close to them, and feel strong empathy when others suffer. Low scorers are less affected by stress, more emotionally detached, and less likely to share their worries.
eXtraversion reflects social confidence, energy, and positive feelings. High scorers enjoy social gatherings, feel comfortable leading groups, and experience a general sense of enthusiasm. Low scorers prefer solitude, feel awkward in the spotlight, and are less prone to positive excitement.
Agreeableness in the HEXACO framework focuses specifically on how you handle conflict. It captures patience, tolerance, gentleness, and the willingness to compromise. This differs from the Big Five version of agreeableness, which blends in traits related to warmth and trust. HEXACO agreeableness is more narrowly about anger management and forgiveness.
Conscientiousness describes how organized, disciplined, and detail-oriented you are. High scorers plan carefully, work methodically, and strive for accuracy. Low scorers are more impulsive, less concerned with tidiness, and more comfortable with “good enough.”
Openness to Experience captures intellectual curiosity, creativity, and appreciation for art and nature. High scorers are drawn to unconventional ideas and get absorbed in imaginative thinking. Low scorers stick with the practical and familiar.
How HEXACO Differs From the Big Five
If you already know the Big Five (also called the Five-Factor Model), three of the HEXACO dimensions will look very familiar. Extraversion, conscientiousness, and openness to experience are nearly identical across both models. The real differences show up in three places.
First, Honesty-Humility has no direct equivalent in the Big Five. Some of its content was previously scattered across Big Five agreeableness and conscientiousness, but it was never measured as its own trait. Second, HEXACO agreeableness is a narrower construct focused on temper and forgiveness, while Big Five agreeableness is broader. Third, HEXACO emotionality reshuffles some content from Big Five neuroticism. Traits related to sentimentality and emotional attachment sit within emotionality in the HEXACO model, while anger-related content that the Big Five places under neuroticism moves into HEXACO agreeableness instead.
These aren’t just relabeling exercises. The reshuffling reflects what researchers found when they analyzed personality-describing words across many languages. When you study how people describe each other in Korean, Dutch, French, Italian, and other languages, six factors consistently emerge rather than five. Confirmatory studies across English, French, and Dutch speakers have shown strong measurement consistency between languages, supporting the idea that this six-factor structure reflects something real about human personality rather than a quirk of English vocabulary.
Why Honesty-Humility Matters
The addition of Honesty-Humility is what gives the HEXACO model its practical edge. This single dimension inversely mirrors most of what psychologists call the Dark Triad: narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism. People who score low on Honesty-Humility tend to score high on those darker traits. That relationship makes Honesty-Humility a powerful predictor of real-world behavior that the Big Five struggles to capture on its own.
Low Honesty-Humility reliably predicts antisocial, manipulative, and unethical behavior. In workplace research, Honesty-Humility and conscientiousness together explain a significant portion of workplace delinquency, including theft, dishonesty, and rule-breaking. Honesty-Humility also shows a protective effect against power harassment, meaning people who score higher on this trait are less likely to bully or intimidate coworkers. These predictions hold up even when people are trying to make a good impression, such as during job applications, which makes the trait useful for organizational screening.
How the Test Works
The standard assessment is the HEXACO Personality Inventory-Revised, which comes in three lengths. The full version has 200 items, the commonly used version has 100 items, and a short form has 60 items. Each dimension is measured through four facets (like sincerity and fairness within Honesty-Humility), with four items per facet in the 100-item version. There’s also a 25th facet called altruism that sits between the main dimensions rather than belonging to any single one. The 60-item version drops the altruism facet and isn’t designed to measure individual facets reliably.
In practice, the 100-item and 60-item versions dominate. A meta-analysis found that these two shorter scales were used in 443 out of 489 studies that administered a HEXACO inventory. Scores are reported on a scale for each dimension, with higher numbers reflecting more of that trait. The test shows solid reliability: domain-level scores on the full 200-item version have a test-retest reliability averaging .85 across a seven-month period, meaning your results stay fairly consistent over time.
Practical Uses
HEXACO has gained significant traction in organizational psychology. Employers and researchers use it to predict counterproductive work behavior (things like absenteeism, sabotage, and dishonesty) and organizational citizenship behavior (going above and beyond your job description to help the team). Honesty-Humility, extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness all predict lower levels of counterproductive behavior and higher levels of helpful behavior, and these predictions hold in both low-pressure research settings and actual job applicant contexts.
The model is also used in personnel risk assessment. Research in Japanese workplaces, for example, found that integrating Honesty-Humility screening alongside dark-trait assessments improved the identification of employees likely to engage in harassment. Beyond the workplace, HEXACO scores have been linked to a wide range of outcomes including environmental attitudes, social media behavior, and academic misconduct. Students with lower Honesty-Humility scores, for instance, are more prone to cheating and plagiarism.
You can take the HEXACO inventory for free at hexaco.org. The results give you a score on each of the six dimensions and their facets, letting you see where you fall relative to the general population. No personality model captures everything about a person, but HEXACO’s six-factor structure consistently picks up patterns of behavior, particularly around integrity and self-interest, that five-factor models tend to miss.