New Developments in HEXACO Personality Research

About twenty years have passed since the six personality factors in the HEXACO model (i.e., Honesty-Humility, Emotionality, eXtraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, andOpenness to experience) first appeared in the literature (Ashton&Lee, 2001; Ashton, Lee,& Son, 2000; Hahn, Lee,&Ashton, 1999). As recountedbySaucier (2019), before the advent of the HEXACO model, personality researchers were inclined to believe that a maximum set of five personality factors were consistently recovered from lexical studies of personality structure (e.g., Goldberg, 1990). A review of these standard lexical studies as well as subsequent ones, however, generally supports the idea that not just five but six factors emerge consistently from these studies (Ashton, Lee, Perugini, et al., 2004; Lee & Ashton, 2008). The additional sixth factor, which contrasts sincerity, integrity, decency, and trustworthiness with boastfulness, hypocrisy, greediness, and untruthfulness, had already been reported in Dutch (De Raad, 1992), Hungarian (Szirmak & De Raad, 1994), and Italian (Di Blas & Forzi, 1998) lexical studies. The consistency of these “anomalous” findings went unnoticed, however, until a Korean lexical study was conducted, which not only uncovered variants of the usual Big Five factors, but also a clearly interpretable sixth Honesty-Humility factor contrasting adjectives such as truthful and frank with adjectives such as sly and cunning (Hahn et al., 1999). In follow-up research, Ashton et al. (2000) showed that this sixth lexical factor explained antisocial traits such as Machiavellianism and psychopathy as well as prosocial traits such as morality and cooperation better than did the Big Five lexical factors. More importantly, a large-scale reanalysis of eight lexical studies in seven languages (Dutch, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Korean, and Polish) showed that this sixth factor emerged consistently (Ashton, Lee, Perugini, et al., 2004). Additional lexical studies in English (Ashton, Lee, & Goldberg, 2004; Lee & Ashton, 2008) further supported this finding, as did re-analyses of previous lexical studies conducted in Turkish (see Wasti, Lee, Ashton, & Somer, 2008), Greek (see Lee & Ashton, 2009), and Croatian and Filipino (see Lee & Ashton, 2008). Finally, cross-cultural comparisons of different lexical factor solutions (De Raad et al., 2014; Saucier, 2009) showed that – across multiple languages – the lexical factor space is best represented by a maximum set of six cross-culturally replicable dimensions of personality, which are now commonly known by the HEXACO acronym. Since 2004, when the first version of the HEXACO Personality Inventory was published (Lee & Ashton, 2004), the number of studies using the HEXACO model has grown steadily. An overview of work on the HEXACO model is offered on the hexaco.org website. It lists studies on a great number of topics that provide evidence regarding the HEXACO Personality Inventory – Revised (HEXACO-PI-R) in terms of its structural properties and its predictive validity. In terms of structural properties, studies are listed on topics such as findings of lexical studies, psychometric properties of the HEXACO-PI-R, comparisons of the HEXACO to the Big Five/Five-Factor Model, selfand observer reports, and problems with higher order factors/personality types. In terms of predictive validity, studies are listed on the relations of the HEXACO personality traits with the dark triad traits, personality disorders, sexual behaviors, risk taking/ sensation seeking, forgiveness, well-being, delinquency, impression management, organizational politics, leadership, bullying, economic behaviors, academic achievement, creativity, authenticity, online and sports behaviors, ecological behaviors, (political) values and religiosity, and response biases (including faking and social desirability). The studies reported on the hexaco.org website have increased our knowledge of the structure of personality, of personality phenomena (such as age-related trends or similarity of social partners), and of the predictive validity of personality for socially important outcomes. This topical issue, which contains seven articles that cover a wide range of HEXACO topics, adds to this growing body of research on the HEXACOmodel. The first article, a historical overview by Saucier (2019), shows how adjective