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HEXACO · IPIP-HEXACO SCALES

Free HEXACO Personality Test

Six personality factors and 24 facets, including Honesty-Humility — the factor the Big Five leaves out. 240 public-domain statements, about 25 minutes, and your answers save as you go.

What the HEXACO model measures

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.

The Big Five came from studies of English personality words. When the same studies were run in other languages, a sixth factor kept appearing — defined by words like sincere, fair, modest, and unassuming versus sly, deceitful, greedy, and pretentious. HEXACO names it Honesty-Humility and reshapes two other factors around it.

The six factors

Honesty-Humility

High: sincere, fair, and unassuming — reluctant to manipulate people, bend rules, or chase status. Low: more willing to flatter, bend rules, or put yourself first, and more drawn to status, money, and recognition.

Emotionality

High: quick to feel fear and worry, drawn to others for support, and moved by other people's feelings. Low: tough-minded and independent — less fearful, less worried, and less in need of others' support.

Extraversion

High: socially confident, talkative, and energetic, at ease leading and being noticed. Low: reserved and quieter, more comfortable outside the centre of attention.

Agreeableness

High: patient, forgiving, and slow to anger — willing to accept people as they are. Low: quicker to anger, critical, and slow to forgive, with a firm sense of how things should be.

Conscientiousness

High: organized, hard-working, careful with detail, and inclined to think before acting. Low: more spontaneous and relaxed about order, effort, and detail, and quicker to act on impulse.

Openness to Experience

High: curious, imaginative, drawn to art and ideas, and comfortable being unconventional. Low: practical and conventional, with less pull toward art, abstract ideas, or the unusual.

Honesty-Humility and the dark traits

Of the six HEXACO factors, Honesty-Humility is the one most closely tied to the 'dark' traits. Its low end — flattering, rule-bending, status-seeking, self-important — overlaps heavily with what Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy have in common. Book, Visser and Volk (2015) found that Honesty-Humility accounts for that shared core better than other personality models do.

The overlap is large but not total. In a 2025 study of 677 Polish adults, a Dark Triad composite correlated −.71 with Honesty-Humility, and the two latent factors −.91 — yet the dark traits still predicted revengefulness beyond what Honesty-Humility explained (Stefanek et al., 2025). That study used other questionnaires, so its numbers describe groups of people, not how your two scores here should line up.

If you have also taken the dark traits test on this device, both result pages show the two side by side, each against its own sample. They are never combined into one score.

Why the IPIP version, and why no percentile

The current HEXACO inventory is copyrighted and free only for non-profit research. Its authors also built a public-domain alternative from the International Personality Item Pool, ten items for each of the 24 facets, and that is what this test administers, verbatim. Their paper reports one reference sample — 411 adults in the Eugene–Springfield Community Sample (Oregon, USA) — with each scale's mean and standard deviation. So your result says whether each score sits above, around, or below that sample's mean, with a likely range from the published reliabilities. It never shows a percentile, because a mean and a standard deviation are not a distribution.

What is free and what the report adds

Honesty-Humility, the most distinctive of your other five factors, the methodology, and the sources are free. The advanced report adds the other four factors, all 24 facets with likely ranges, the facets that break from their own factor, a fuller reading of Honesty-Humility against the dark traits, how HEXACO differs from the Big Five, a 90-day practice, and an AI reflection module.

COMMON QUESTIONS

HEXACO questions, answered

How is HEXACO different from the Big Five?

It adds a sixth factor, Honesty-Humility, and divides two others differently. In lexical studies in several languages, patience versus irritability went with Agreeableness and sensitivity versus toughness with the emotional factor, so HEXACO Emotionality includes sentimentality and dependence 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.

What does Honesty-Humility measure?

Sincerity, fairness, greed avoidance, and modesty: at the high end, people who do not manipulate others, would not cheat even when they could get away with it, and are unmoved by status; at the low end, people more willing to flatter, bend rules, and pursue wealth and recognition. It is a personality trait, not a moral grade, and neither end is simply good.

How does Honesty-Humility relate to the Dark Triad?

Closely. Its low end overlaps heavily with what Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy have in common; in one 2025 study a Dark Triad composite correlated −.71 with Honesty-Humility. But the two are not identical — the dark traits still predicted revengefulness beyond Honesty-Humility. If you have taken both tests on this device, each result page shows the two side by side, each against its own sample, and never combines them.

Is this the official HEXACO-PI-R?

No. The HEXACO-PI-R is copyrighted and free only for non-profit research. This test uses the IPIP-HEXACO scales, a public-domain alternative its own authors built from International Personality Item Pool items. The paper reports convergent correlations of .76 to .86 with the original inventory's factors, and also names its limits: its Honesty-Humility and Agreeableness scales overlap more than the original's.

Why is there no percentile?

Because the paper publishes one reference sample — 411 adults in an Oregon community sample — with each scale's mean and standard deviation, not a distribution. That supports saying whether a score sits above, around, or below that sample's mean, which is what the result does. It does not support a percentile, and the site does not invent one.

Why are there 240 questions?

Because the instrument has 24 facet scales of ten items each, and dropping items would make it a different, unvalidated questionnaire. Your answers save after every question, so you can stop and come back. If you want something shorter, the 50-item Big Five test takes about seven minutes.

Can employers use this for hiring or integrity screening?

No. It is a self-report questionnaire that is easy to fake when the answer matters, it is not validated for selection here, and using Honesty-Humility as an integrity screen would be unfair to individuals. This implementation is a self-reflection tool.

SOURCES

Where this test comes from

  1. [1]
    Ashton, M. C., Lee, K., & Goldberg, L. R. (2007). The IPIP–HEXACO scales: An alternative, public-domain measure of the personality constructs in the HEXACO model. Personality and Individual Differences, 42, 1515–1526. ↗

    The instrument. The source of the scoring (facets as item means, factors as facet means), the reference sample of 411 Eugene–Springfield community adults whose means and SDs the result is placed against, the alphas behind every likely range, and the limits quoted on the result page.

  2. [2]
  3. [3]
    Lee, K., & Ashton, M. C. (2004). Psychometric properties of the HEXACO Personality Inventory. Multivariate Behavioral Research, 39(2), 329–358. ↗

    The original HEXACO-PI, whose 24 facets the IPIP-HEXACO scales mirror. The current inventory, the HEXACO-PI-R, is copyrighted and free for non-profit research only; it is not what this site administers.

  4. [4]
    Book, A., Visser, B. A., & Volk, A. A. (2015). Unpacking “evil”: Claiming the core of the Dark Triad. Personality and Individual Differences, 73, 29–38. ↗

    Why the result links Honesty-Humility to the dark traits: across two studies, Honesty-Humility accounted for what Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy share better than other personality models did.

  5. [5]
    Stefanek, F., Flakus, M., Baran, L., Kowalski, C. M., & Rogoza, R. (2025). The dark core and honesty-humility: (Nearly) perfectly correlated yet distinct constructs. Current Issues in Personality Psychology, 13(2), 109–117. ↗

    Open access. The source of the two correlations quoted on the result page (−.71 between composites, −.91 between latent factors, 677 Polish adults) and of the finding that the two constructs are still distinct.