24-question Honesty-Humility test — the HEXACO sixth factor the Big Five omits. Sincerity, fairness, greed-avoidance and modesty.
Honesty-Humility Test (HEXACO Sixth Factor)
Twenty-four statements, about three minutes. Honesty-Humility is the dimension the Big Five leaves out. You will get four facet scores — sincerity, fairness, greed-avoidance, modesty — and one domain score. Why there is a total here when our dark triad test refuses one is explained in full below.
Honesty-Humility is not Big Five Agreeableness. Agreeableness is about tolerating other people's bad behaviour; Honesty-Humility is about not exploiting people when you could get away with it.
How the Honesty-Humility Test Works
Answer for what you actually do, not what you would like to be true
This matters more here than on most tests, and it runs the opposite way to our dark triad test. Several items describe an advantage you could take and do not — extra change, a billing error, an oversight that happens to favour you. Almost nobody wants to admit they would keep the money, so social desirability pushes these scores up. The more honestly you own the unflattering choices, the more the result is worth.
Rate 24 statements
Six per facet, three worded each way. The balance is there to defeat straight-line answering: agree with everything and all four facets land on the midpoint together, and the page will tell you the result is not worth much.
Read the domain first, then the four facets
The domain runs 24–120 and each facet runs 6–30. The total tells you the level; the facets tell you the shape. Two people with the same middling total can be completely different — one flat across all four, one high on fairness and low on greed-avoidance.
Read the scores as description, not as a moral grade
A low score does not make you a bad person and a high one does not make you a good one. These are positions on a scale. Each facet page covers what the pattern looks like day to day, where it genuinely helps, and who tends to pay for it.
About Honesty-Humility — the Factor the Big Five Leaves Out
How a Sixth Factor Was Found
The Big Five came out of the lexical hypothesis: if a personality difference matters to people, a language will eventually grow a word for it. Feed enough trait adjectives to native speakers, factor-analyse the ratings, and five factors fall out reliably. The catch was the language. Most of the early work was done in English. From the 1990s onward researchers ran the same procedure in Korean, Hungarian, Italian, Dutch, Polish and French, and a sixth factor kept appearing: a cluster around honest, sincere, unassuming and unpretentious on one side and sly, greedy, boastful and opportunistic on the other. It had no home in the Big Five, so it was split awkwardly between Agreeableness and Conscientiousness, fitting neither. Ashton and Lee gave it its own axis and, with a redefined Agreeableness and Emotionality, produced the six-factor HEXACO model. Honesty-Humility is the H.
The first reaction is usually: is this not just Agreeableness renamed? It is not, and this distinction is the single most useful thing to take away from this page. Agreeableness is about how you react when you are the one being ill-used — whether you forgive, whether you stay patient, whether you hold a grudge, whether you are easy to get along with. Honesty-Humility is about your restraint when you are the one holding the advantage — nobody would find out, nobody would come after you, do you take it? Make it concrete: a supplier quietly offers you a kickback if their name goes to the top of the comparison sheet. Agreeableness predicts almost nothing about whether you take it. A warm, conflict-averse colleague who never has a bad word for anyone can pocket that money; a prickly, argumentative one who picks fights in every meeting may not touch it. Empirically the two correlate only weakly to modestly, and they predict different behaviour. If you have taken our Big Five personality test, nothing in that result covers this — which is precisely why this test exists.
"Several items here describe an advantage you could take and do not. That means scores are pushed up by self-presentation — and it means a high result is the ambiguous one on this test."
Why There Is a Total Here When Our Dark Triad Test Refuses One
Our dark triad test states plainly on the page that there is no combined "darkness score", because Machiavellianism, narcissism and subclinical psychopathy are three separate constructs that are only moderately intercorrelated. Averaging them would assert a single underlying factor the evidence does not support — and worse, high Machiavellianism (planned, patient) and high psychopathy (impulsive, short-horizon) are close to behavioural opposites, so a mean turns two completely different people into the same number. The structure here is genuinely different. Sincerity, fairness, greed-avoidance and modesty are not four parallel traits; they are four facets of one factor. They load together on a single latent factor H, they intercorrelate substantially more than the dark triad traits do, and they are theoretically expected to covary — that is what the word facet means. Summing the facets of a factor is how this research tradition itself reports that factor. Summing three constructs that merely happen to be neighbours is not. Put it in one line: a total is defensible when the parts compose a whole, and an illusion when the parts are simply adjacent. The total still cannot replace the shape, which is why this page gives you the four facets alongside it, on the same chart.
What This Item Set Can and Cannot Tell You
Two honest limits, starting with validity. The construct itself rests on a solid body of work: Honesty-Humility is negatively associated with counterproductive workplace behaviour, academic dishonesty and exploitative interpersonal strategies, and it retains predictive power after the Big Five dimensions are statistically controlled — which is the empirical reason it was given its own axis in the first place. But the twenty-four statements you will rate are an original RECATOOLS item set. We wrote our own because the published HEXACO instruments are licensed for non-commercial academic research and this is an ad-supported commercial site. Rather than borrow ambiguously, we built transparently: the scoring rule is published on this page and the kernel and its tests live in the repository. The cost of that choice is real — our specific items carry no validation or test-retest study, so treat the result as structured self-reflection rather than measurement. The second limit is inherent to self-report. These questions measure your description of yourself, not a record of your behaviour, and on this factor that gap is unusually load-bearing, because the item content is itself about willingness to admit something unflattering. What we can do is name the direction: the bias here pushes up, not down. So if all four of your facets land in the higher band, that is the hardest result on this test to read — while a low score, being costly to admit, carries more information.
The Four Facets
Sincerity
Whether you get what you want by asking for it, or by working around people — flattery, groundwork, a favour banked in advance.
Fairness
Whether you take the unearned advantage in the moment when nobody would ever know you took it.
Greed-Avoidance
How much wealth, luxury and status actually drive you, as opposed to how much you say they do.
Modesty
Whether you feel entitled to more consideration, more latitude and more attention than the people around you.
Frequently Asked Questions
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The Big Five has no equivalent dimension. That is not a claim that the Big Five is wrong — it is a claim that five factors were not enough to hold this cluster. Adjectives like honest, unassuming, greedy and opportunistic get split between Agreeableness and Conscientiousness and fit neither properly. HEXACO gives the cluster its own axis as the sixth factor H, and redefines Agreeableness (as tolerance and patience) and Emotionality to match. So this test is not a replacement for the Big Five; it covers the part the Big Five does not. You can take both: our Big Five personality test gives you five dimensions, and this one gives you the sixth.
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No, and the two predict different behaviour. Agreeableness answers "what do you do when someone treats you badly?" — forgive, tolerate, stay patient, avoid grudges. Honesty-Humility answers "what do you do when you hold the advantage and nobody will ever know?" — take the kickback or not, inflate the expense claim or not, quietly help yourself where nobody is looking. One is about your reaction on the receiving end; the other is about restraint on the advantaged end. Empirically they correlate only weakly to modestly: an easy-going person can still be greedy, and a difficult one can be scrupulous. Collapsing them costs you accuracy at exactly the moment the distinction matters most — such as sizing up someone you are about to do business with.
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Because the structures differ, not because the standards do. The dark triad's three traits are separate constructs with only moderate intercorrelation, and high Machiavellianism (planned) and high psychopathy (impulsive) are near behavioural opposites, so an average would compress two very different people into one number. Sincerity, fairness, greed-avoidance and modesty are four facets of a single factor: they load on one latent dimension, they intercorrelate much more strongly, and they are expected to move together. Summing the facets of a factor is standard practice in that literature. Parts that compose a whole can be summed; parts that are merely neighbours cannot.
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This is the hardest result on this test to read, and it is fairer to say so. Several items describe an advantage you could take — the extra change, the billing error in your favour. Admitting you would keep it is unflattering, so social desirability pushes scores up systematically here. That is the mirror image of our dark triad test, where every item is unflattering and the pressure runs down. As a result, a low score honestly given carries more information than a flattering high one. If you want a more useful reading, retake it thinking about specific occasions — what you actually did the last time it came up, not what you believe you would do.
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No. This facet is not about how much money you have or how carefully you spend it. It is about how much wealth, luxury and status drive your choices. Someone on a high income who has no interest in visible brands and picks jobs on the work rather than the package scores high; someone on a modest income whose central life goal is one day to live in that kind of house scores low. It is also not a synonym for frugality — frugality is a spending habit, greed-avoidance is a motivational structure. Reading it as "rich people score low" is the most common mistake on this facet.
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No. These are positions on a scale, not verdicts. The low ends have real uses: not showing your whole hand, laying groundwork and choosing what to disclose is a genuine skill in negotiation; people strongly driven by money and status are often the ones who push things through to the end; believing you deserve more is not a liability in a role where you have to fight for resources. Each also carries costs, and the costs usually land on the people around you — which is the part actually worth looking at. Description and verdict are different things.
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Openly. Each facet runs 6–30, with 13 and below in the lower band, 14–22 in the middle and 23 and above in the higher band. The domain runs 24–120, with 55 and below lower, 56–88 middle and 89 and above higher. These are fixed cut-points on the scale, not percentiles — this page will never tell you that you scored higher than some percentage of people, because we have no normative sample, and any free web test claiming to give you a percentile is worth a second look.
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To catch straight-line answering. Some people agree with statements regardless of content, or disagree with all of them, and on a one-directional bank that habit becomes a score by itself. With three items keyed each way, the habit cancels out: agree with all 24 and every facet lands on the midpoint together. The page says so explicitly when it detects this, because it means there is very little to read in the result.
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Yes, and that is the empirical case for giving it its own factor. It is negatively associated with counterproductive workplace behaviour, academic dishonesty, exploitative interpersonal strategies and free-riding in economic games, and it holds predictive power after the five Big Five dimensions are statistically controlled — meaning it captures something they do not. Two caveats belong with that. The associations are moderate rather than decisive, and they attach to the construct of Honesty-Humility, not to this specific unvalidated item set.
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No, and please do not. This is a free web test with no validation study, no norms and no faking safeguards, and in a hiring context the respondent has a powerful incentive to answer upward — inflating a bias that already runs upward until the scores mean very little. Legitimate personnel selection uses validated instruments chosen with local employment law in mind, not a web questionnaire. Treat this as a starting point for thinking about yourself, not as evidence about somebody else.
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Yes. Personality traits are relatively stable in adulthood but not fixed, and a self-report questionnaire also picks up your current state and self-image — you will answer differently just after being taken advantage of than just after doing something you are not proud of. More practically, this item set has no test-retest reliability study, so we cannot tell you how stable its results are. Treat it as a snapshot.
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No. Your answers are scored entirely in your browser and are never uploaded or stored by RECATOOLS. While a test is in progress they are kept in your browser's local storage so you can resume if the tab closes, and they are deleted when you finish. Viewing pages on this site works like any other website and is covered by our Privacy Policy.
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