Why we use HEXACO instead of the Big Five

Most people who have heard of personality science know the Big Five. It has been the dominant framework for decades, and for good reason — it captures broad, recurring patterns in behavior across cultures and contexts.

HEXACO keeps five of those dimensions: Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Emotionality (a refined version of the Big Five’s Neuroticism). What it adds is a sixth: Honesty-Humility.

Honesty-Humility captures individual differences in sincerity, fairness, modesty, and the tendency to avoid exploiting others. Research shows that this dimension predicts behavior that the Big Five largely misses — particularly in situations involving temptation, low oversight, or power imbalances (Ashton & Lee, 2007).

A recent meta-analysis found that Honesty-Humility was the single strongest personality predictor of workplace deviance — stronger than any of the Big Five dimensions. In fact, the HEXACO model as a whole explained roughly 32% of the variance in workplace deviance, compared to 19% for the Big Five (Pletzer et al., 2019). That is not a marginal improvement.

The HEXACO model did not emerge from a single study or a single language. It is the result of lexical research conducted across more than a dozen languages, where researchers analyzed which personality-descriptive words people naturally use to describe one another. Across these languages, six factors — not five — consistently emerged (Ashton et al., 2004).

This matters because it means the structure is not imposed by theory — it is discovered in how humans actually talk about each other, across cultures.

For Lobe, the choice was straightforward. If a sixth dimension consistently appears in cross-cultural research, explains meaningful behavior that the Big Five cannot, and has been validated across dozens of countries, it should be part of the model. Leaving it out would mean ignoring one of the most informative dimensions of personality available today.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• HEXACO retains the Big Five’s core dimensions and adds a sixth: Honesty-Humility.

• Honesty-Humility captures sincerity, fairness, and modesty — traits the Big Five largely misses.

• HEXACO explains significantly more variance in important outcomes like workplace behavior than the Big Five alone.

• The model emerged from cross-cultural lexical research across more than a dozen languages.

REFERENCES

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.

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.

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.