HEXACO personality test: your scores on six factors

The HEXACO personality test describes you with six broad factors: Honesty-Humility, Emotionality, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness and Openness to Experience. The name is built from their initials, with the X taken from eXtraversion. Each factor is a range, not a box. You are not simply modest or ambitious, calm or sensitive; you land somewhere along each scale, and most people sit near the middle on at least a few of them.

Honesty-Humility covers sincerity, fairness, modesty and how little you care about wealth and status. Emotionality covers fear, worry, the wish for support and emotional attachment. Extraversion covers social confidence, boldness and energy. Agreeableness covers forgiveness, gentleness, flexibility and patience. Conscientiousness covers organization, effort, perfectionism and caution. Openness covers curiosity, creativity, a feel for beauty and comfort with unconventional ideas. Together the six give a fuller picture than a single type label.

The HEXACO model was developed by psychologists Kibeom Lee and Michael Ashton in the early 2000s. Like the Big Five, it rests on the lexical approach: the idea that the personality differences people care about most end up as words in everyday language. Researchers in many countries had collected the adjectives people use to describe one another and looked for the broad factors that tie those words together.

When Lee, Ashton and their colleagues compared lexical studies from several languages, including Dutch, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Korean and Polish, six factors kept appearing rather than five. The sixth grouped words such as sincere, fair and modest against sly, greedy and pretentious, and they named it Honesty-Humility. Lee and Ashton later built their own questionnaire, the HEXACO-PI-R. The HEXACO personality test on this page is independent and uses original items.

The clearest difference is Honesty-Humility. The Big Five has no separate factor for it; part of its content, such as straightforwardness and modesty, sits inside Big Five Agreeableness. HEXACO gives it a factor of its own, which lets the HEXACO personality test tell apart someone who is warm but happy to bend the rules from someone who is gruff yet scrupulously fair.

The other two changes are subtler. HEXACO Emotionality is not simply Neuroticism: it keeps fear, anxiety and the need for support, adds sentimentality and emotional attachment, and leaves out anger. Anger moves to Agreeableness instead, so a short temper, grudges and stubbornness sit at the low end of HEXACO Agreeableness, while forgiveness and patience sit at the high end. Extraversion, Conscientiousness and Openness map fairly closely onto their Big Five counterparts.

There are 60 statements, ten for each factor, shown in a shuffled order so that similar items do not cluster together. For each one you choose Strongly agree, Agree, Neutral or unsure, Disagree or Strongly disagree. Every answer moves exactly one factor. Strongly agree counts fully, Agree counts half, Neutral counts nothing, and the two disagree options count the same amounts in the other direction.

Half the items for each factor are reverse-keyed. Agreeing with "Small errors in my work bother me until I fix them" raises Conscientiousness, while agreeing with "For most tasks, good enough is good enough for me" lowers it. Each total is then shown as 0 to 100% of the possible range: 100% means every answer pointed fully toward the factor, 0% fully away from it, and 50% sits in the middle.

These numbers are not percentiles. A score of 70% on Honesty-Humility does not mean you scored higher than 70% of people; it means your own answers sat about 70% of the way up the scale. The HEXACO personality test here has no population norms, so treat each score as a description of how you answered rather than a ranking against others.

Below 40% counts as low, above 60% as high and 40 to 60% as middle, and your results page shows the matching description for each factor. Middle scores are common and still say something real. They usually mean the trait depends on the situation, like someone who is patient with friends but short with slow service, or bold at work but quiet at parties.

Neither end of any factor is better. High Honesty-Humility builds trust but can mean underselling yourself, while low Honesty-Humility can bring drive and negotiating skill. High Emotionality makes you careful and empathic, while low Emotionality keeps you steady in a crisis. Start with your highest and lowest factors, then look at combinations: high Honesty-Humility with low Agreeableness, for example, often describes someone who is scrupulously fair but quick to anger when others are not.

If you have already taken the Big Five personality test, the HEXACO personality test makes a useful companion. Your Extraversion, Conscientiousness and Openness scores will likely look similar on both, while Agreeableness and Emotionality may shift because the two models split those traits differently. Honesty-Humility is the new information, and for many people it is the most interesting part of the result.

Type-based tests take another angle. The 16 personality test sorts you into one of 16 types from four preferences, and the Enneagram test points to one of nine types built around a core motivation. Types are easier to remember and share, while trait scores show how strong each tendency is. Taking a type test and a trait test side by side often shows the same pattern from two directions.