Honesty-humility
Also known as: HEXACO H factor
The sincerity-and-fairness trait that the Big Five leaves out.
What it means
Honesty–Humility is the sixth dimension of personality in the HEXACO model, capturing sincerity, fairness, greed-avoidance, and modesty — the disposition to be genuine, to treat others fairly even when one could exploit them, and to avoid entitlement and status-seeking. It emerged from lexical studies in multiple languages that recovered a factor not well represented in the Big Five, which folds some of this content imperfectly into Agreeableness. Low Honesty–Humility is the strongest personality correlate of the Dark Triad, unethical behavior, exploitation, and cheating, while high scorers cooperate and reciprocate even without external enforcement. It matters because it predicts integrity-relevant outcomes — workplace deviance, fraud, free-riding in economic games — better than the Big Five alone, making it valuable for ethics, selection, and the study of cooperation.
Examples
Handed too much change, a person high in Honesty–Humility returns it unprompted; someone low on the trait pockets it and feels entitled.
Handed a colleague's idea in a promotion round with nobody present to contradict him, a manager low in Honesty–Humility takes the credit and feels no discomfort at all.
In an online game where cheating is undetectable, high scorers still play by the rules — the threat of being caught was never what was holding them back.
First described in Ashton & Lee, HEXACO model (2000s).