The HEXACO and Big Five personality models are closely related frameworks for describing broad, stable patterns in personality. Both organize many specific traits into a small number of major dimensions, and both are used in personality research to summarize how people tend to think, feel, and behave.
The main difference is that HEXACO has six broad dimensions, while the traditional Big Five has five. Four dimensions are broadly similar across the two models, but HEXACO separates some content differently—most notably by adding Honesty–Humility as a distinct factor and by defining Agreeableness and Emotionality differently from their Big Five counterparts.
What are the Big Five personality traits?
The Big Five model describes personality using five broad dimensions:
Openness to Experience: curiosity, imagination, aesthetic sensitivity, and interest in ideas and novelty
Conscientiousness: organization, self-discipline, responsibility, and goal-directed behavior
Extraversion: sociability, assertiveness, energy, and positive engagement with others
Agreeableness: qualities such as compassion, cooperativeness, patience, and interpersonal accommodation
Neuroticism, sometimes labeled Emotional Stability when scored in the opposite direction: sensitivity to stress, anxiety, insecurity, and emotional volatility
These dimensions are broad summaries, not complete descriptions of a person. People also differ in narrower traits, habits, values, abilities, life experiences, and social circumstances.
The Big Five is not one single questionnaire. It refers to a family of related models and measurement instruments that represent five broad personality domains. Different instruments may use somewhat different labels, facet structures, or item wording.
What is the HEXACO model?
HEXACO describes personality with six broad dimensions:
Honesty–Humility: sincerity, fairness, modesty, and a reduced tendency toward status seeking or exploitation
Emotionality: fearfulness, anxiety, dependence on close relationships, and sentimentality
Extraversion: social confidence, liveliness, and positive social engagement
Agreeableness: patience, forgiveness, gentleness, and tolerance
Conscientiousness: organization, diligence, prudence, and carefulness
Openness to Experience: intellectual curiosity, creativity, and appreciation of unusual or aesthetic experiences
The name HEXACO comes from the initial letters of the six domains: Honesty–Humility, Emotionality, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Openness to Experience. The model grew from cross-language studies of personality-descriptive words and has been developed through a broad research program involving lexical and questionnaire-based measures.¹
Are the HEXACO and Big Five basically the same?
They are similar, but they are not interchangeable.
Four HEXACO dimensions correspond fairly closely to Big Five dimensions:
HEXACO | Closest Big Five counterpart |
|---|---|
Extraversion | Extraversion |
Conscientiousness | Conscientiousness |
Openness to Experience | Openness to Experience |
Emotionality | Neuroticism, with important differences |
The fifth major comparison is more complicated:
HEXACO Honesty–Humility does not have a direct one-to-one counterpart in the traditional Big Five.
HEXACO Agreeableness overlaps with Big Five Agreeableness, but the two domains emphasize different qualities.
This means that a person’s scores may look similar across both models in some areas but noticeably different in others.
What is the biggest difference between the two models?
The most important difference is the presence of Honesty–Humility in HEXACO.
Honesty–Humility includes traits related to sincerity, fairness, modesty, and reluctance to manipulate or exploit others. In the HEXACO framework, these characteristics form a broad domain rather than being scattered across several other traits.
In many Big Five measures, related content may appear in narrower facets of Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, or other scales, depending on the instrument. Some Big Five-based models also include measures related to antagonism, hostility, or interpersonal manipulation, but the traditional five-domain structure does not generally provide a single broad factor equivalent to HEXACO Honesty–Humility.²
This difference can matter when a researcher wants to study personality patterns involving sincerity, entitlement, modesty, fairness, or exploitative behavior. HEXACO provides a dedicated domain for that content, which can make such distinctions easier to examine.
Is Honesty–Humility the same as being a “good” person?
No. Honesty–Humility is a personality dimension, not a moral verdict.
A higher score generally reflects greater self-reported sincerity, fairness, modesty, and reluctance to use others for personal gain. A lower score may reflect greater interest in status, privilege, personal advantage, or strategic self-presentation. These tendencies do not determine every action a person will take, and they should not be used as a complete assessment of someone’s character.
Personality scores also depend on the measure used, the setting, the person’s interpretation of the questions, and the limits of self-report. A score should be understood as a description of measured tendencies, not as a final judgment.
How do HEXACO Agreeableness and Big Five Agreeableness differ?
The two Agreeableness domains overlap, but they are organized around somewhat different content.
In many Big Five models, Agreeableness emphasizes compassion, warmth, trust, cooperation, and concern for others. Some versions also include politeness and modesty, while others place related characteristics elsewhere.
HEXACO Agreeableness places particular emphasis on patience, forgiveness, gentleness, and tolerance. It is also more closely associated with how readily a person becomes angry, irritated, or vengeful. The HEXACO model assigns some interpersonal qualities—especially sincerity, fairness, and modesty—to Honesty–Humility rather than to Agreeableness.³
This difference can produce an important contrast:
Someone may be compassionate and helpful but also easily angered.
Someone may be patient and forgiving but not especially socially outgoing.
Someone may be modest and fair because of high Honesty–Humility rather than high Agreeableness.
The labels sound similar, but the underlying trait content is not identical.
How do HEXACO Emotionality and Big Five Neuroticism differ?
HEXACO Emotionality and Big Five Neuroticism are related, but they are not exact equivalents.
Both can involve vulnerability to distress and sensitivity to threatening or difficult experiences. However, the HEXACO Emotionality domain gives more emphasis to fearfulness, anxiety, dependence on close relationships, and sentimentality. The Big Five Neuroticism domain often places greater emphasis on negative emotional states such as anxiety, sadness, irritability, and emotional instability.
A major distinction is that HEXACO Emotionality commonly includes attachment-related and sentimental tendencies, while some Big Five measures treat warmth, sentimentality, or dependence differently. HEXACO Emotionality also does not simply function as a direct copy of Big Five Neuroticism with a new label.¹
The two models may therefore produce different interpretations of the same person. For example, someone could report strong sentimental attachment and a need for emotional closeness without scoring especially high on every form of negative emotionality.
Why does HEXACO have Emotionality instead of Neuroticism?
The different label reflects a different arrangement of trait content.
The Big Five tradition commonly uses Neuroticism to describe a broad tendency toward negative emotional experience and emotional instability. HEXACO uses Emotionality to capture a pattern that includes fearfulness, anxiety, sentimentality, and dependence-related qualities.
The models are not simply competing over which word is better. They divide the content differently. As a result, the same questionnaire responses may be summarized under different domain names depending on the model being used.
Which model includes more personality information?
Neither model automatically includes more information in every practical sense.
HEXACO has six broad domains, so it gives Honesty–Humility a separate place. The Big Five has five broad domains and is supported by a large body of research, widely used measures, and extensive connections to other psychological concepts. HEXACO may offer a clearer structure for studying sincerity, exploitation, fairness, modesty, and related interpersonal tendencies. The Big Five may be more convenient when a project needs continuity with an established five-domain literature.
The number of domains is not the same as the total amount of information. A questionnaire’s facets, item quality, scoring method, sample, and purpose also matter. A detailed Big Five instrument can assess many narrower traits, and a HEXACO instrument can do the same.
Do the models measure the same traits with different names?
Sometimes, but not always.
For Extraversion, Conscientiousness, and Openness, the relationship is generally fairly direct. For Emotionality and Neuroticism, the relationship is substantial but imperfect. For Agreeableness and Honesty–Humility, the relationship is more complicated because the models distribute interpersonal content differently.
A useful way to think about this is:
Some domains are near matches.
Some domains are partial matches.
Some traits are reorganized across domains.
Honesty–Humility is a major HEXACO domain without a simple traditional Big Five equivalent.
This is why researchers should compare actual scales and facets rather than assuming that similarly named domains mean precisely the same thing.
Where did the difference between the models come from?
The models developed from related but not identical approaches to personality structure.
The Big Five tradition became prominent through research identifying recurring patterns in personality-descriptive language and questionnaire data. The HEXACO model emerged from cross-language lexical research that identified six broad factors in several language-based studies. The addition of the sixth factor was linked especially to the repeated appearance of content involving sincerity, fairness, modesty, and status-related behavior.¹
The cross-language approach is important because it asks whether personality-relevant distinctions recur in everyday language across different languages. It does not prove that one model is universally correct, but it provides one line of evidence about how people commonly describe personality.
Does HEXACO replace the Big Five?
No. HEXACO does not make the Big Five unusable, and the Big Five does not make HEXACO unnecessary.
The two models serve overlapping purposes and are supported by different research traditions and measurement resources. The better choice depends on the question being asked.
HEXACO may be especially useful when a study focuses on:
honesty and sincerity
exploitation or manipulation
modesty and status seeking
fairness and reciprocity
personality relationships involving ethical or antisocial behavior
The Big Five may be especially useful when a study requires:
comparison with a large existing literature
compatibility with established Big Five measures
continuity with prior findings reported in five-domain terms
a broad general-purpose personality summary
Researchers should select the model that best matches the construct, sample, measure, and research question.
Can a person’s HEXACO and Big Five results disagree?
Yes, and that does not necessarily indicate an error.
Results can differ because:
The models organize traits differently. A quality assigned to one domain in a Big Five measure may appear in another HEXACO domain.
The questionnaires use different items. Two instruments may claim to measure the same broad domain but emphasize different facets.
The response format differs. Rating scales, forced-choice formats, and item wording can affect scores.
Self-report is context-sensitive. People may answer based on how they usually behave, how they want to behave, or how they think others see them.
Broad domains hide narrower patterns. Two people can receive the same broad score for different reasons.
For example, someone might score moderately high on Big Five Agreeableness while showing a mixed HEXACO profile: high patience but only moderate Honesty–Humility. That result would not be contradictory. It would suggest that the two measures are separating interpersonal qualities in different ways.
Can HEXACO predict behavior better than the Big Five?
There is no single answer for every behavior or setting.
HEXACO’s separate Honesty–Humility domain can be useful when the outcome involves exploitation, rule breaking, unethical conduct, or interpersonal manipulation. Research comparing personality models has found that Honesty–Humility can add information beyond traditional Big Five domains for some outcomes, particularly outcomes closely related to honesty, ethics, and antagonistic interpersonal behavior.²
That does not mean HEXACO will always predict behavior better. Predictive value depends on the outcome, the sample, the measure, the research design, and the quality of the comparison. For many outcomes, Big Five domains remain highly informative. Personality models are descriptive and probabilistic: they can help identify broad tendencies, but they do not determine what any individual will do.
Are the models useful in counseling or self-reflection?
They can be useful as structured language for discussing patterns, provided they are used carefully.
A personality profile may help someone reflect on questions such as:
Do I tend to seek social stimulation or quiet time?
How do I respond to pressure?
Am I organized and persistent?
How readily do I forgive or become irritated?
How strongly do I value novelty and unusual ideas?
How do I approach status, fairness, and personal advantage?
The results should not be treated as a diagnosis, a permanent label, or a complete account of identity. Scores describe tendencies measured at a particular time and under particular conditions. They do not remove the importance of learning, values, goals, relationships, culture, or situational demands.
For personal use, it is also wise to choose a well-documented measure and interpret the results with appropriate caution rather than relying on an informal online quiz.
Which model should I use?
Use the Big Five when you need compatibility with a large established literature or when your project already uses a well-supported Big Five measure.
Use HEXACO when Honesty–Humility is central to your question or when you want a distinct assessment of fairness, sincerity, modesty, status seeking, and exploitative tendencies.
If you are comparing studies, do not rely on domain names alone. Check:
the exact questionnaire
the domain and facet definitions
the scoring direction
the sample and setting
whether the measure is self-report or informant-report
the evidence supporting reliability and validity
The best model is the one that matches the question and measures the relevant traits clearly.
What is the simplest summary?
The Big Five and HEXACO are closely related broad personality models. They share substantial common ground, especially for Extraversion, Conscientiousness, and Openness. HEXACO differs by adding Honesty–Humility as a separate domain and by arranging Agreeableness and Emotionality differently from many Big Five measures.
In short:
The Big Five offers five broad dimensions; HEXACO offers six, with Honesty–Humility as its distinctive addition.
Neither model gives a complete definition of a person. Each is a useful map, and the right map depends on what you want to understand.
Notes
Kibeom Lee and Michael C. Ashton, “Psychometric Properties of the HEXACO Personality Inventory,” Multivariate Behavioral Research 39, no. 2 (2004): 329–358; Michael C. Ashton and Kibeom Lee, “The HEXACO Model of Personality Structure and the Importance of the H Factor,” Social and Personality Psychology Compass 2, no. 5 (2008): 1952–1962.
Michael C. Ashton and Kibeom Lee, “The Prediction of Honesty–Humility-Related Criteria by the HEXACO and Five-Factor Models of Personality,” Journal of Research in Personality 42, no. 5 (2008): 1216–1228.
Michael C. Ashton, Kibeom Lee, and Reinout E. de Vries, “An Assessment of the Validity of the HEXACO Personality Inventory,” Journal of Personality Assessment 93, no. 5 (2011): 448–454.