The Big Five is the best-known map of personality, but it was drawn from English words. When researchers repeated the same studies in other languages, a sixth factor kept turning up.
This guide explains the six HEXACO factors, what makes Honesty-Humility different, and how our HEXACO test measures all of them with public-domain items.
The HEXACO model describes personality with six broad factors: Honesty-Humility, Emotionality, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Openness to Experience, each with four facets. It grew out of lexical studies in several languages that found a sixth factor beyond the Big Five. This test administers the public-domain IPIP-HEXACO scales, 240 items written to mirror the 24 facets of the HEXACO Personality Inventory.
Where the six factors come from
Lexical studies assume that the personality differences people care about end up as words. Analysing how people rate themselves on common adjectives produced the Big Five in English. In several other languages the same method also produced a sixth factor, defined by words like sincere, fair, modest, and unassuming versus sly, deceitful, greedy, and pretentious. Kibeom Lee and Michael Ashton called it Honesty-Humility and built the HEXACO model around six factors.
- ✦Honesty-Humility: sincerity, fairness, greed avoidance, modesty.
- ✦Emotionality: fearfulness, anxiety, dependence, sentimentality.
- ✦Extraversion: expressiveness, social boldness, sociability, liveliness.
- ✦Agreeableness: forgiveness, gentleness, flexibility, patience.
- ✦Conscientiousness: organisation, diligence, perfectionism, prudence.
- ✦Openness to Experience: aesthetic appreciation, inquisitiveness, creativity, unconventionality.
Not just the Big Five plus one
Two factors are cut differently. In many languages, patience versus irritability sat with Agreeableness, and sensitivity versus toughness with the emotional factor. So HEXACO Emotionality includes sentimentality and needing others, but not anger, and HEXACO Agreeableness is about patience and forgiveness. A Big Five score and a HEXACO score with the same name are not interchangeable — if you want the Big Five facets, take the Big Five facet test instead.
Honesty-Humility and the dark traits
The low end of Honesty-Humility — flattering, rule-bending, status-seeking — overlaps heavily with what Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy share. Book, Visser, and Volk (2015) found it accounted for that shared core better than other personality models. In a 2025 study of 677 adults, a Dark Triad composite correlated −.71 with Honesty-Humility.
The overlap is not total: in the same study the dark traits still predicted revengefulness beyond Honesty-Humility. If you take both our HEXACO test and the dark traits test, each result shows the other alongside it, never combined into one number.
How our test measures it
The official HEXACO-PI-R is copyrighted and free only for non-profit research. Its authors also published a public-domain alternative built from International Personality Item Pool items: 240 statements, ten per facet. We administer those verbatim and score them as the paper does.
The paper reports one reference sample — 411 adults in an Oregon community sample — with each scale's mean and standard deviation. So your result says whether each score sits above, around, or below that mean, with a likely range from the published reliabilities. It never gives a percentile. The authors also name the version's limits: its Honesty-Humility and Agreeableness scales overlap more than the original's.