HEXACO Dimensions
The defining feature of HEXACO is to specify 6 dimensions.
“HEXACO” stands for
- H - Honesty-Humility
- E - Emotionality
- X - eXtraversion
- A - Agreeableness
- C - Conscientiousness
- O - Openness to Experience
You find easily some description of these dimensions.
HEXACO Facets
Each of the 6 dimensions has 4 facets.
Please find in my graph below the results for half of the facets, two facets for each dimension.
These results are based on a particular HEXACO Test that used 240 questions, which is not the one that you currently find on hexaco.org for self test.
The middle line of each box indicates the mean. The variation is indicated by the width of the respective box.
I adjusted the scale for ease of readability:
‘+++’ on fearfulness should relate to a ‘very fearful’ individual, whereas a ‘- - -‘ just means the opposite.
Details given on the original site
The available data needed some preparations and cleaning, as nearly half of questions are posed in reverse order. Some participants were presumably not answering seriously. I removed such data.
HEXACO Facets - What does this result mean?
Are the others as we expect them to be?
At first, you surely noticed that many means are not at zero. For ‘Fairness’, ‘Aesthetic Appreciation’, and ‘Inquisitiveness’ the mean is between ‘+’ and ‘++’.
Shouldn’t it be the goal for a facet to average out at zero?
I think, it should.
Presumably, the intention of the questioners was to exactly that. Hence, the difference between the expectations on the distribution of answers and the ‘real’ answers is very interesting.
I infer that even the experts were at least a bit wrong about their expectations. They just didn’t know better. But now we’ve got these great results. We shouldn’t waste this chance to get more insights out of them!
In this sense, participants assessed themselves to possess surprisingly high
- Fairness
- Anxiety
- Aesthetic Appreciation
- Inquisitiveness
If you took that particular HEXACO test and those results turned out to give you slightly positive scores for such facets, then you are in fact just average.
As this also holds true for creativity and unconventionality, slightly positive scores are nothing special. Most people apparently think of themselves to be creative and unconventional. In particular, do not praise yourself to like arts, as really most participants do - but also don’t blame yourself for thinking to be “more capable than most others” as more people do so than don’t.
Variance
Investigating the graph in more detail, you see the variance for fearfulness to be considerably smaller than for anxiety.
As for anxiety, participants seem “to worry a lot”. As most do so intensively, i.e. the higher scores are filled substantially, but as others don’t worry at all, the variance is high.
As for fearfulness, participants are e.g. moderately “prepared to take risks”, with only a few being on the far risk taking side and even fewer on the extreme risk-avoidance side.
Variance investigation leads to personality traits which support more than others to distinguish persons. In an interview, hence, you might want to pick questions from the anxiety set and omit those from fearfulness.
Quality of Data
Certainly, these results depend on the data.
When you start with a fresh data set, the results will vary heavily at the start and converge only with more data. More than 22 000 data, i.e. answers to 240 questions, is beyond the scope of needed here. For any subset of 1000 data, the same qualitative result is reached. Consequently, the means and the distributions are fairly solid.
A restriction is though that the participants might have predominantly been ‘curious internet users’. They might not be representative of the whole population. However, it is exactly that part of the population that I am interested in.
Acknowledgements and References
Please feel encouraged to support the cause of HEXACO by visiting the official site, perform the HEXACO test yourself and consider to contribute for their service to return the assessment for free on their site:
Let me further recommend the book THE H FACTOR of PERSONALITY by the HEXACO inventors, Kibeom Lee and Michael C. Ashton. It gives particularly insights on the H-factor that distinguishes HEXACO most from other personality tests