The empirical distinction between honesty-humility and big five-agreeableness: Initial evidence from German samples

Since the advent of the HEXACO model, personality psychologists examined the distinctiveness of its honesty-humility factor from the already known agreeableness factor from the Big Five model. It has been argued that honesty-humility was redundant with Big Five-based agreeableness. However, an extensive evaluation of the separability of agreeableness and honesty-humility at a large-scale level is still pending. Using four German samples, consisting of students and individuals from the general population alike ( n total = 3976), honesty-humility turned out to be best understood as correlated with yet distinguishable from Big Five- and HEXACO-agreeableness in terms of factor structure and relations with focal criteria. Furthermore, honesty-humility and agreeableness scores augmented each other in accounting for variance in several criteria. These findings favor the theoretical and empirical separation between honesty-humility and agreeableness, irrespective of the underlying conceptualization of agreeableness. Cross-cultural replications and behaviorally oriented paradigms should confirm the present findings.