HEXACO personality test: what it measures and misses

HEXACO measures six traits, including Honesty-Humility. Scores hold over two weeks but rise when a job is at stake. The evidence and its limits.

The HEXACO personality test measures six traits: Honesty-Humility, Emotionality, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness and Openness. Kibeom Lee and Michael Ashton built it. Its scores are stable, with a median retest correlation of .88 over about 13 days, yet they rise when a job is at stake. Both facts matter when you read a result.

What does the HEXACO test measure?

Each trait is scored from four narrower facets, listed in the official scale descriptions. A seventh scale, Altruism, sits between three traits and is left out of the six trait scores.

Answers run from 1 to 5. Reverse-worded items are flipped and each score is the average of its items, as set out in the official scoring key. The official forms have 60 or 100 items, and a 200-item form is available on request. Undergraduates finish the 100-item form in about 20 minutes and the 60-item form in about 12, according to the authors' materials page.

Where did the six factors come from?

They came from the words people use to describe each other. Ashton and colleagues (2004) reported a similar six-factor solution across seven languages: Dutch, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Korean and Polish. The official history dates construction of the inventory to 2000, so you can discount any page that places it in the 1990s.

The six-factor claim has support and limits. Saucier (2009) found six recurrent factors in a different set of seven languages. De Raad and colleagues (2014) compared 11 taxonomies and found three components at the core. Those two results can both hold, because three broad factors can sit above six narrower ones. The sharper challenge is Thalmayer and colleagues (2019), who studied two languages from sub-Saharan Africa, Maa and Supyire-Senufo, and did not recover the six factors or the Big Five under their main criterion. They call the finding tentative. The fair summary is that six factors recur in many languages and are not shown to be universal.

How is HEXACO different from the Big Five?

It adds Honesty-Humility and rearranges two familiar traits. In Ludeke and colleagues (2019), a meta-analysis of four samples totaling 1,586 people, HEXACO Agreeableness correlated -.61 with Volatility, an aspect of Big Five Neuroticism. Anger belongs on the Agreeableness side in HEXACO. HEXACO Emotionality correlated .38 with Compassion, an aspect of Big Five Agreeableness, which shows where its sentimental content comes from. Honesty-Humility correlated .51 with Politeness, another part of Big Five Agreeableness.

So a person quick to anger and tender toward family could read very differently on the two tests. If you know your Big Five result, guess where you would land on these two traits before you read a HEXACO score.

How reliable are HEXACO scores?

Henry and colleagues (2022) tested 416 online participants about 13 days apart on the 100-item form. The six trait scores correlated from .86 to .92 between sittings. A correlation near .9 means people keep nearly the same rank from one sitting to the next. Facets were lower, with a median of .81, and single items lower still at .65.

The agreement column, as reported in the same paper from Lee and Ashton's (2018) student data, compares your answers with those of someone who knows you. Moderate agreement is what these figures show: the people around you see something similar, with plenty of room for difference. Honesty-Humility has the lowest agreement of the six.

The retest sample was not representative of any one population, as its authors note. Treat the numbers as strong evidence about stability, and weaker evidence about any one group.

Can you fake a HEXACO test?

Yes, and Honesty-Humility, the trait that reads like an integrity signal, moves a lot. Anglim and colleagues (2017) compared 1,613 real job applicants with 1,613 people answering at low stakes. Applicants scored higher on Honesty-Humility by d = 0.86, and on Agreeableness by d = 1.06. A gap of 0.86 puts the average applicant above about 80% of the comparison group. The two groups were matched, and nobody was tested twice, so the design shows a difference between groups rather than the same person changing answers.

Put that beside the retest table. A score can hold steady for two weeks and still shift when the reason for taking it changes. If an employer gives you this test, or you read someone else's result, ask what they stood to gain.

What does HEXACO predict better than the Big Five?

The best-known evidence concerns harmful behavior at work. Pletzer and colleagues (2019) found that HEXACO explained 31.97% of the variance in workplace deviance (12 samples, 3,177 people), against 19.05% for the Big Five (20 samples, 6,731 people). Honesty-Humility had the strongest link, with a corrected correlation of -.482, and carried about 57% of the explained variance. Conscientiousness came next at -.403.

Three limits apply. The studies were mostly cross-sectional, so they cannot show cause. The two models were compared in different sets of samples. And this is one outcome, so it does not show HEXACO wins everywhere. For breadth, Zettler and colleagues (2020) pulled together 3,893 effect sizes across 426 meta-analyses of HEXACO correlates, and read each trait as a basic theme: exploitation for Honesty-Humility, insecurity for Emotionality, sociality for Extraversion, obstruction for Agreeableness, duty for Conscientiousness and exploration for Openness.

How do you read your score?

Against other people, with care. The only reference figures we found on the official site come from 1,126 Canadian undergraduates. They are a convenience sample and are not population norms. We found no official cut-offs or percentiles.

Emotionality also shows the largest gap between women and men in this sample, with averages of 3.69 and 3.01. A score of 3.7 means something different depending on who you compare it with.

Our own free HEXACO-style test has 12 statements, two per trait, and takes about three minutes. It is our short measure of the same six traits, separate from the official HEXACO-PI-R, so the figures in this post do not transfer to it. Use it as a first look at where you might sit. For how far to trust any test, see how accurate personality tests are and our personality tests hub, and for two other models side by side, OCEAN compared with the MBTI.

Frequently asked questions

Is the HEXACO test free?

The official forms are free only for non-profit academic research, and the authors do not let researchers collect data through a public site or app. The hexaco.org materials page sets out the terms and asks non-academic users to contact the authors.

Is HEXACO better than the Big Five?

For some outcomes. It explained more workplace deviance in one meta-analysis, 31.97% against 19.05%. A 2022 comparison of 152 samples also reported less redundancy between its dimensions, and warned that results differ between Big Five measures.

How long does the HEXACO test take?

Undergraduates complete the 60-item form in about 12 minutes and the 100-item form in about 20.

What should you remember about HEXACO scores?

The numbers to remember are a pair: .88 over two weeks, and d = 0.86 when a job is on the line. A HEXACO score describes you well when you have no reason to look good.

How we checked: we read the official hexaco.org pages and the full text of Henry 2022, Pletzer 2019, Anglim 2017, Ludeke 2019 and a preprint of Thalmayer 2019. For Ashton 2004, Lee and Ashton 2018, Saucier 2009, De Raad 2014, Zettler 2020 and Thielmann 2022 we used the abstracts, and the Lee and Ashton agreement figures come from Henry's table.