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HEXACO vs Big Five: The Honest Difference

The HEXACO model adds one factor the Big Five does not measure: Honesty-Humility. Here is what that changes, and when it matters.

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If you have spent any time inside personality research, you have probably hit the question: should I be using the Big Five (five traits) or HEXACO (six)? The honest answer is "it depends on what you are trying to learn." This post explains the difference, what HEXACO adds, and what it does not.

What HEXACO is

HEXACO was developed by Kibeom Lee and Michael Ashton in the early 2000s after looking at personality words in many different languages and finding something the Big Five had quietly missed 1. The acronym stands for:

  • H — Honesty-Humility
  • E — Emotionality
  • X — eXtraversion
  • A — Agreeableness
  • C — Conscientiousness
  • O — Openness

Three of these (Extraversion, Conscientiousness, Openness) are almost identical to the Big Five versions. Two (Emotionality, Agreeableness) are rotated versions of Big Five traits — they cover similar territory but slice it slightly differently. One — Honesty-Humility — is genuinely new.

The H-factor

The H-factor measures something the Big Five does not isolate cleanly: how sincere, fair, and modest a person tends to be — and how willing they are to take advantage of others for personal gain.

High H: sincere, fair, not interested in status games, low willingness to exploit others. Low H: comfortable bending rules for personal benefit, status-driven, willing to be deceptive when it helps.

The Big Five does pick up some of this, scattered across low Agreeableness and high traits not in the standard model (like the "dark triad" of Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy). HEXACO concentrates it into a single factor and measures it directly.

That is the case for HEXACO in one sentence: if you care about predicting ethical behavior, HEXACO can do something the Big Five does not.

What HEXACO predicts better

The research shows H-factor has a clear edge in a few places:

Ethical behavior at work. People scoring low on Honesty-Humility are more likely to engage in workplace deviance, fraud, and counterproductive behavior — even when controlling for Conscientiousness 2.

Dark personality traits. HEXACO captures variance in narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy that the Big Five misses 3. If a researcher wants to study antisocial tendencies, HEXACO is the cleaner instrument.

Cooperation in economic games. People high in H share more in dictator games and trust experiments. The effect is robust and replicates 4.

What the Big Five still does better

For most practical purposes — career fit, mental-health risk, relationship satisfaction, day-to-day behavior — the Big Five performs at least as well.

The Big Five also has 50 years of research behind it. Almost every large personality study in the last few decades has used a Big Five instrument. If you want to compare your scores against population norms, ask "is this typical?", or read across the existing research, the Big Five is the lingua franca.

HEXACO is younger. The norms are smaller. Many fewer studies use it.

The other rotated traits

HEXACO did not just add the H-factor. It also redefined Agreeableness and Emotionality slightly:

  • HEXACO Agreeableness removes the "calm in conflict" content and pushes it into a different factor. It is about forgiveness, patience, gentleness.
  • HEXACO Emotionality combines anxiety, sentimentality, and fearfulness, but moves anger out (where the Big Five Neuroticism includes anger).

These changes are not better or worse than the Big Five version. They are different cuts of the same cloth. Which cut is more useful depends on what you are trying to study.

When to use which

A simple rule of thumb:

Use the Big Five if:

  • You want population norms and a large research base
  • You are looking at career fit, leadership, life satisfaction
  • You want to compare your scores to most existing studies
  • You want a 12-minute assessment (IPIP-NEO-120)

Use HEXACO if:

  • You are studying or screening for ethical or workplace-deviance behavior
  • You want to capture dark-triad-adjacent traits in a single instrument
  • You are okay with a smaller comparison base

Some assessments — including Defaults — let you choose. We default to the IPIP-NEO-120 (Big Five) because it fits more use cases, but we also offer an IPIP-HEXACO option for people who specifically want the H-factor measurement.

The case both models share

Both HEXACO and Big Five share something the MBTI does not: they treat personality as a set of continuous scores, not types. Both have been built on decades of language-based research. Both produce results that hold up across cultures, languages, and decades.

The choice between them is a technical question. The choice between either of them and the MBTI is not.

Try the Big Five (12 min, free) → — or pick HEXACO at the start of the assessment if you specifically want H-factor data.

References

Footnotes

  1. 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. https://doi.org/10.1177/1088868306294907 ↩

  2. Lee, K., Ashton, M. C., & de Vries, R. E. (2005). Predicting workplace delinquency and integrity with the HEXACO and five-factor models of personality structure. Human Performance, 18(2), 179–197. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327043hup1802_4 ↩

  3. Lee, K., & Ashton, M. C. (2014). The dark triad, the big five, and the HEXACO model. Personality and Individual Differences, 67, 2–5. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2014.01.048 ↩

  4. Hilbig, B. E., & Zettler, I. (2009). Pillars of cooperation. Journal of Research in Personality, 43(3), 516–519. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2009.01.003 ↩

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