What is the HEXACO model? Honesty-Humility, the sixth personality factor
By the 64 Types team · Updated October 13, 2026 · 6 min read · 13 peer-reviewed sources
The HEXACO model describes personality with six broad traits: Honesty-Humility, Emotionality, eXtraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness and Openness to Experience. It grew out of studies of personality vocabulary in many languages, which repeatedly found six factors rather than five.[1][2] Its distinctive addition, Honesty-Humility, describes sincerity, fairness, lack of greed and modesty. It predicts ethical and cooperative behaviour better than the Big Five does.[3][4]
This guide explains where HEXACO came from, what Honesty-Humility is (and is not), what it predicts, and how 64 Types uses it as the sixth letter of your code.
Where the HEXACO model came from
The Big Five was built largely on English-language adjectives. When researchers ran the same kind of lexical study in other languages, a consistent six-factor structure appeared. A 2004 paper compared results from Dutch, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Korean and Polish and found a similar six-factor solution in all seven.[1] Michael Ashton and Kibeom Lee then proposed the HEXACO model as an alternative to the Big Five and set out its theoretical advantages.[2] They also built a dedicated questionnaire, the HEXACO Personality Inventory, and reported its psychometric properties.[5]
Public-domain HEXACO scales were later assembled from the International Personality Item Pool (IPIP), so researchers and websites can measure these constructs without licensing fees.[6] 64 Types uses those items.
The six HEXACO factors
| Factor | High scorers | Closest Big Five trait |
|---|---|---|
| Honesty-Humility (H) | Sincere, fair, uninterested in luxury and status, modest | No direct equivalent |
| Emotionality (E) | Anxious, sentimental, dependent on support, fearful of physical danger | Neuroticism (partly) |
| eXtraversion (X) | Sociable, socially confident, lively | Extraversion |
| Agreeableness (A) | Forgiving, patient, gentle, slow to anger | Agreeableness (partly) |
| Conscientiousness (C) | Organised, diligent, careful, perfectionistic | Conscientiousness |
| Openness to Experience (O) | Curious, creative, unconventional, appreciative of beauty | Openness |
Three of the six are close relatives of their Big Five counterparts. The interesting differences are in Honesty-Humility, Emotionality and Agreeableness. In the lexical data, anger and ill temper sat at the low pole of Agreeableness rather than with anxiety, while Emotionality included sentimentality and lack of bravery.[1] So HEXACO Emotionality is not simply Big Five Neuroticism under another name.
What Honesty-Humility measures
In the HEXACO inventories, Honesty-Humility is made of four facets:[5][6]
- Sincerity: reluctance to flatter or manipulate people to get what you want.
- Fairness: reluctance to cheat, steal or bend the rules for personal gain.
- Greed Avoidance: little interest in wealth, luxury and signs of high status.
- Modesty: seeing yourself as an ordinary person without a claim to special treatment.
| Facet | Higher (M · Modest) | Lower (A · Ambitious) |
|---|---|---|
| Sincerity | Says what they think; avoids flattery as a tactic | Comfortable using charm or flattery to get ahead |
| Fairness | Will not cheat even when it would pay | More willing to bend rules when the risk seems low |
| Greed Avoidance | Little interest in luxury goods or displays of wealth | Motivated by money, status symbols and recognition |
| Modesty | Sees themselves as ordinary; dislikes special treatment | Feels entitled to more respect or privileges than others |
People low on the trait are not necessarily dishonest in every situation. They are more motivated by status, money and getting ahead, more comfortable with flattery and self-promotion, and more willing to bend rules when it pays and the risk is low. That is why 64 Types calls the low pole Ambitious (A) and the high pole Modest (M).
Is Honesty-Humility just Agreeableness?
No, and the distinction is one of the model’s main contributions. Being pleasant and being fair are different things. Someone can be warm, charming and conflict-avoidant (high Agreeableness) while quietly working the angles (low Honesty-Humility). Someone else can be blunt and impatient (low Agreeableness) yet scrupulously honest (high Honesty-Humility). Ashton and Lee argue that the six-factor model separates these forms of prosocial tendency, which the Big Five blends together.[2]
When you judge whether to trust someone, separate “is this person nice to me?” from “does this person play fair when nobody is checking?” The second question is closer to Honesty-Humility.
What Honesty-Humility predicts
Workplace deviance
A meta-analysis comparing the Big Five with HEXACO found that Honesty-Humility had the strongest relation with workplace deviance, such as theft, sabotage, absenteeism and mistreating colleagues. Together, the HEXACO domains explained more variance in deviance (about 32%) than the Big Five domains did (about 19%).[3]
Cooperation and fairness in economic games
In experiments where people decide how to split money, those higher in Honesty-Humility behaved more fairly toward others, including in situations where they could have kept more for themselves without consequence.[7] A meta-analysis of 770 studies of economic games found that traits linked to the possibility of exploiting others, Honesty-Humility prominent among them, were among the most consistent predictors of prosocial behaviour.[4]
The “dark” traits
Low Honesty-Humility is strongly associated with psychopathy, Machiavellianism and narcissism, and the HEXACO model captured these traits better than the Big Five did.[8]
A wide network of outcomes
A large-scale meta-analytic review of the HEXACO model mapped how each factor relates to many other variables and behaviours, and found that Honesty-Humility adds information that the other five factors do not.[9]
As with any personality trait, these are average tendencies across many people, with modest effect sizes. A score does not tell you whether a particular person will behave honestly in a particular situation.
Using your Honesty-Humility score
Because Honesty-Humility is so closely tied to how others judge your trustworthiness, it is worth reading your result with some care. The suggestions below are practical, not findings from the studies above.
If you score as Ambitious (A), your drive for status and success can be an engine. The risk is to long-term trust. Be explicit about credit, disclose conflicts of interest early, and keep a few relationships where nothing is being traded.
If you score as Modest (M), you may undersell your work and avoid negotiating. Fairness includes being fair to yourself: document your contributions and ask for what the role is worth.
In teams, separate charm from fairness. Someone who is pleasant in meetings (Agreeableness) is not necessarily the one who shares credit and keeps confidences (Honesty-Humility). Watch what people do when it costs them something.
Honesty-Humility is not the same as being a pushover. Low Agreeableness combined with high Honesty-Humility describes someone who is blunt but fair, a pattern the HEXACO model was designed to capture.[2] Finally, most evidence that traits respond to therapy and deliberate effort comes from studies of the Big Five traits,[10] and less is known about Honesty-Humility specifically. Even so, a percentile describes where you are now, not where you must stay.
Honesty-Humility in 64 Types: the M/A letter
The sixth letter of your 64 Types code reflects Honesty-Humility, measured with 12 public-domain IPIP-HEXACO items, three for each facet.[6] Your score is compared with about 22,800 responses from a public dataset, and you receive a percentile. A trait within 10 percentile points of average is flagged as borderline. See How the 64 Types test works.
Two points are worth knowing:
- Our fifth letter (C/R) is not HEXACO Emotionality. It is Big Five emotional stability, the opposite of Neuroticism, measured with Goldberg’s markers.[11] We chose it because the evidence on wellbeing and mental health is built mainly on that trait.[12][13] Read more in our emotional stability guide.
- “A” at the end of a code means Ambitious, not “Assertive” as in some other online tests. For example, ENTJ-CA is composed (C) and status-driven (A), while INFJ-RM is emotionally responsive (R) and modest (M).
Frequently asked questions
What does HEXACO stand for?
The six factors: Honesty-Humility, Emotionality, eXtraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness and Openness to Experience.[2]
Is HEXACO better than the Big Five?
It is a well-supported alternative. Its main advantage is Honesty-Humility, which predicts outcomes such as workplace deviance and fairness in economic games beyond the Big Five.[3][4] The Big Five has a longer research history, especially on health and wellbeing.
Is low Honesty-Humility bad?
It is linked on average to more rule-bending and self-interested behaviour.[3][8] But it also describes motivation for status and success, and a percentile is a description, not a verdict on character.
Can people fake a high Honesty-Humility score?
Any self-report questionnaire can be answered dishonestly, especially when the stakes are high. On a free, anonymous self-discovery test there is little reason to, which is why we present it as a reflection tool and not a screening instrument.
References
- Ashton, M. C., Lee, K., Perugini, M., Szarota, P., de Vries, R. E., Di Blas, L., Boies, K., & De Raad, B. (2004). A six-factor structure of personality-descriptive adjectives: Solutions from psycholexical studies in seven languages. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 86(2), 356–366.
- Ashton, M. C., & Lee, K. (2007). Empirical, theoretical, and practical advantages of the HEXACO model of personality structure. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 11(2), 150–166.
- Pletzer, J. L., Bentvelzen, M., Oostrom, J. K., & de Vries, R. E. (2019). A meta-analysis of the relations between personality and workplace deviance: Big Five versus HEXACO. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 112, 369–383.
- Thielmann, I., Spadaro, G., & Balliet, D. (2020). Personality and prosocial behavior: A theoretical framework and meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 146(1), 30–90.
- Lee, K., & Ashton, M. C. (2004). Psychometric properties of the HEXACO Personality Inventory. Multivariate Behavioral Research, 39(2), 329–358.
- 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(8), 1515–1526.
- Hilbig, B. E., & Zettler, I. (2009). Pillars of cooperation: Honesty–Humility, social value orientations, and economic behavior. Journal of Research in Personality, 43(3), 516–519.
- Lee, K., & Ashton, M. C. (2005). Psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and narcissism in the Five-Factor Model and the HEXACO model of personality structure. Personality and Individual Differences, 38(7), 1571–1582.
- Zettler, I., Thielmann, I., Hilbig, B. E., & Moshagen, M. (2020). The nomological net of the HEXACO model of personality: A large-scale meta-analytic investigation. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 15(3), 723–760.
- Roberts, B. W., Luo, J., Briley, D. A., Chow, P. I., Su, R., & Hill, P. L. (2017). A systematic review of personality trait change through intervention. Psychological Bulletin, 143(2), 117–141.
- Goldberg, L. R. (1992). The development of markers for the Big-Five factor structure. Psychological Assessment, 4(1), 26–42.
- Kotov, R., Gamez, W., Schmidt, F., & Watson, D. (2010). Linking "big" personality traits to anxiety, depressive, and substance use disorders: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 136(5), 768–821.
- Steel, P., Schmidt, J., & Shultz, J. (2008). Refining the relationship between personality and subjective well-being. Psychological Bulletin, 134(1), 138–161.
How we write guides: every research claim cites a peer-reviewed source, effect sizes are reported as published, and advice that goes beyond the evidence is labelled as a practical tip. See our methodology. Found an error? Email [email protected].
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