HSS: Honesty-Humility and Openness to Experience: The Personality Dimensions behind What We Value

Since the early 2000s, widespread evidence has emerged in favor of the six-dimensional HEXACO personality model of personality. One of the unique features of this model is that it includes a new factor named Honesty-Humility. In this seminar, I suggest that the Honesty-Humility (H) factor, along with the Openness to Experience (O) factor, plays an important role in shaping our views about what ought to matter in our lives. First, I begin with a serendipitous finding showing that close friends (and romantic partners) are similar to each other for the H and O factors, but only for these two factors. Furthermore, the evidence indicates that people tend to overestimate their similarity on these two aspects of personality. Second, I argue that such similarities among close acquaintances in the H and O factors can be explained by the relevance of the two personality factors to one’s personal value system. Specifically, personal values are an important part of one’s identity, thereby influencing the formation and maintenance of social relationships, and it is the H and O factors that chiefly underlie personal values. Third, I present empirical results showing the links of the H and O factors to a variety of variables that are socio-political in nature (e.g., personal values, ideology, and attitudes toward nature and humanity). Finally, I will discuss some future research directions in relation to the H and O factors.