HEXACO

Six-factor model

 Reviewed by Psychology Today Staff

Character matters! Personality differences are often summed up based on five broad dimensions, which are called the Big Five: neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness to experience. But in the early 2000s psychologists discovered evidence of a sixth personality factor, which led to a new model of personality called HEXACO. The distinctly new factor is called “honesty-humility,” and it is a component of moral character. (The other components of HEXACO are all variations of the Big Five.

The Six-Factor Model of Personality

HEXACO retains much of the Big Five, but redefines some of the personality factors and adds a sixth. Today, both the five-factor model and HEXACO are used by different teams of personality researchers to capture differences between people.

The factors that make up HEXACO are:

• Honest-humility
• Emotionality (similar in a number of ways to neuroticism),
• Extraversion
• Agreeableness
• Conscientiousness
• Openness to Experience

What is “honesty-humility”?

Broadly speaking, honest-humility is a dimension of personality that reflects the degree to which a person promotes—or doesn’t—their own interests above those of others. More specifically, it includes aspects of personality such as one’s levels of sincerity, fairness, modesty and (dis)interest in wealth and signs of status.

What did the HEXACO model change about the Big Five?

Beyond the addition of honesty-humility, the HEXACO model defines other factors somewhat differently than the five-factor model does. A trait factor called emotionality roughly corresponds with the Big Five factor neuroticism, but includes some components that neuroticism does not, such as sentimentality. Similarly, the HEXACO version of agreeableness encompasses whether one is anger-prone or not, which would be linked to neuroticism in the Big Five.