HEXACO

What is HEXACO?

HEXACO is a model of personality with six broad dimensions: Honesty-Humility, Emotionality, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Openness to Experience. Psychologists Kibeom Lee and Michael C. Ashton developed the HEXACO personality inventory to measure these dimensions.

The model grew out of lexical studies, which examine the words people use to describe personality. Researchers look for broader patterns in ratings of those descriptions, then ask whether similar patterns appear in different languages. The authors describe that development in their history of the inventory, and provide definitions and research materials on the official HEXACO site.

HEXACO describes dimensions, not six exclusive personality types. A person has a score on each dimension. These scores describe tendencies; they do not dictate how someone will act in every situation.

What the six dimensions mean

The official scale descriptions distinguish these tendencies:

• Honesty-Humility: Higher scores describe greater fairness and modesty, with less willingness to exploit people for gain or status.
• Emotionality: Higher scores include more fear and worry, stronger emotional attachments, and greater desire for support.
• Extraversion: Higher scores describe greater social confidence, enjoyment of company, and energy.
• Agreeableness: Higher scores describe more patience, forgiveness, flexibility, and restraint of anger.
• Conscientiousness: Higher scores describe more organization, persistence, attention to accuracy, and deliberation.
• Openness to Experience: Higher scores describe greater curiosity, imagination, appreciation of beauty, and receptiveness to unusual ideas.

These are HEXACO definitions. Emotionality is not simply Big Five Neuroticism: emotional attachment belongs here, while anger is associated with lower HEXACO Agreeableness. Research comparing the models examines how their trait content overlaps and differs.

A profile example

A hypothetical person could score high on Conscientiousness, low on Extraversion, and high on Openness: organized in their work, less drawn to social gatherings, and curious about unfamiliar ideas. Those descriptions can coexist. A profile combines dimensions rather than selecting one as the person’s type.

The model and the inventory

HEXACO is the six-dimension model. The HEXACO Personality Inventory–Revised (HEXACO-PI-R) is a family of questionnaires designed to measure it. The authors provide 60-item and 100-item versions, in self-report and observer-report forms. A 200-item version is available by contacting the authors when longer facet measures are needed. A self-report asks you about yourself; an observer report asks someone else to describe you. These are different sources of information, even when the trait labels match.

Each broad dimension contains narrower traits called facets. For example, Honesty-Humility includes sincerity, fairness, greed avoidance, and modesty. These distinguish being straightforward with people, avoiding exploitation, having little appetite for status goods, and not claiming special importance. The inventory's development history explains this structure. Two people with similar overall Honesty-Humility scores could have different combinations of these tendencies: one might be particularly modest but place more value on luxury goods, while another shows the reverse pattern. A broad score summarizes the facets without making them identical.

Interpreting a HEXACO result

To understand whether a score is high or low, you need to know who it is being compared with. The authors' materials page provides descriptive statistics—summaries of how a group scored—for English-language forms from Canadian undergraduate students. Those students are not a representative sample of every adult. A percentile calculated from their scores describes your relative position among that group, rather than among all people. For example, being above most students in that sample would not establish that you are above most adults worldwide.

Check the version, language, and scoring rules as well as the comparison group. The official keys for the 60-item and 100-item forms calculate trait and facet scores as means: reverse the designated responses, then average the relevant item scores. With the standard 1–5 responses, both forms therefore use the same 1–5 score range. Their different lengths do not, by themselves, put them on different numerical scales. But they use different sets of questions, and interpreting a score still requires the appropriate version and reference group. The same numerical score is not enough to establish the same percentile or exactly equivalent measurement.

The materials page also specifies conditions for research use and asks users to contact the authors about non-academic uses. A downloadable questionnaire is not automatically permission to build a public commercial test.

For a worked explanation of reference groups, see test norms and percentiles. For questions about whether an instrument supports a particular decision, use the guide to evaluating personality tests.

A HEXACO score and a score from another test can look alike without meaning the same thing. The guide to reading personality test results shows how to check what each number represents before you compare them.