Personality: HEXACO vs. Big Five
similar models of personality psychology
I forget where, but I recently came across a reference to the HEXACO personality classification system. A web search took me to a description from Kibeom Lee, Ph.D., & Michael C. Ashton, Ph.D.
The main addition to the Big Five system is an honesty-humility scale.
Honesty-Humility: Persons with very high scores on the Honesty-Humility scale avoid manipulating others for personal gain, feel little temptation to break rules, are uninterested in lavish wealth and luxuries, and feel no special entitlement to elevated social status. Conversely, persons with very low scores on this scale will flatter others to get what they want, are inclined to break rules for personal profit, are motivated by material gain, and feel a strong sense of self-importance.
I think that my wife and all of our friends are high on this trait. The only relationship I ever had with someone who is less than very high on this trait was when I had my Internet business. My main business partner was probably average on this trait, at best. Where I was stupidly inclined to assign a low value to advertising on our site, he was willing to charge outrageous prices. “We are teaching them how to use the Web for their business. It’s like tuition,” he explained. He was right.
But when the Dotcom stock boom took off, he was humble enough to decide that he was not the one to lead a public company. He used his sales skills to sell us to a competitor shortly after it went public, which was a much less stressful way of taking advantage of the Dotcom boom.
What is neuroticism in the Big Five becomes emotionality in HEXACO. As with neuroticism, emotionality is more likely to be high among women than men. I am generally low in emotionality, but I do fear physical danger, which the authors include in their description of emotionality.
Extraversion is a strange category for me. There are some social situations where I feel an urge to withdraw. But I also get very stimulated by being around people, and I am very willing to speak up in groups. So I think I am moderately high on extraversion as defined by the authors here.
For the authors, agreeableness means not becoming angry and holding grudges. I might not be so low on agreeableness according to that definition. But I prefer to think of myself as low on agreeableness.
Conscientiousness means managing to keep commitments. I am super-high on that. I don’t finish everything I start, but that is only because I like to experiment. When I am determined to complete something, I do it. I took an undergraduate econometrics seminar, and my professor told me that I was the first student in the history of the course to hand in the required paper on time.
On openness to new experience, I would say that it is a mixed bag. On some dimensions, I am very open. For example, I was one of the first people to attempt a web-based business. Recently, I was willing to try to “clone” myself at delphi.ai.
But I am not one of those people who is interested in new restaurants, new video entertainment, or new places to visit. My wife and I have gone to the same beach for vacation just about every year since we have been married. Overall, she may be even lower on openness in that dimension than I am.
Philip K. Dick said, "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away". Handle says "Personality are those individually distinct tendencies which, even after you correct for experience and learning, don't go away." That is, what is really interesting about personality is how apparently hardwired and inflexible it is. The "surfing uncertainty" model of cognition and mental process is that they are doing all kinds of automatic Bayesian updating based on experiences and environmental cues and this relatively plastic and adjustable over time. But core personality traits don't seem to adjust much. General levels of fear and anxiety, hesitancy vs recklessness, and so forth seem to be very little moved by experience, and I find that most people's levels of fear or carelessness about any particular danger or risk to be wildly miscalibrated compared to reality, but more to the point, in a manner that tends to -stay- that way regardless of what happens or any effort to argue them out of it with logic and evidence. It is interesting to wonder why nature seems to want to produce a wide mix of personalities (one sees this even along genetically close siblings in homogenous populations) and put some kind of cognitive friction into preventing those personalities from adjusting much.
I am reminded of a Normal Mailer observation: "There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same."