Exploring the stability of HEXACO‐60 structure and the association of gender, age, and social position with personality traits across 18 countries

Abstract

Objectives The present paper tests the cross‐national stability of the HEXACO‐60 structure across 18 countries from four continents. Gender and age differences across countries will be examined. Finally, this is the first study to explicitly analyze the relationships between the HEXACO and social position. Method Ten thousand two hundred and ninety eight subjects (5,410 women and 4,888 men) from 18 countries and 13 languages were analyzed. Confirmatory factor analysis techniques were used to test configural, metric and scalar invariance models. Congruence coefficients with the original structure of the HEXACO‐60 were computed for every culture. Effect sizes of gender, age, and social position factors across countries were also computed. Results HEXACO‐60 demonstrates configural and metric invariance, but not scalar invariance. Congruence coefficients show a great equivalence in almost all countries and factors. Only Emotionality presents a large gender difference across countries. No relevant effect of age is observed. A profile of high scores on Honesty‐Humility, Extraversion, Conscientiousness, and Openness to Experience, and low scores on Emotionality increases the likelihood of achieving a higher social position, although the effect sizes are small. Conclusions HEXACO‐60 is a useful instrument to conduct personality trait research and practice around the world. Implications of gender, social position, and country differences are discussed.

Locating the Dark Triad in a Multidimensional Personality Space

“…Note that the second largest correlation in the HEXACO intercorrelation matrix (see appropriate submatrix in Table 1) is that between Conscientiousness and Extraversion, with a value of .15 which, while being modest at best, is still of the same size as that reported recently by both García et al (2021) and Thielmann et al (2020). This is not, however, the result, as an anonymous reviewer has suggested, of “metric partial non-invariance of the Hebrew version” of HEXACO–60, because García et al (2021) reported metric invariance of the HEXACO–60 across eighteen cultures/languages, including that of our sample. Such cross-cultural metric invariance has also been reported by Thielmann et al (2020).…”

“…Two limitations of the present study should be stressed. First, our participants completed the three questionnaires in the same order (ZKA-PQ/SF, HEX-ACO-60, SD3)-following the prescribed protocol of the larger, cross-cultural study (Aluja et al, 2020;García et al, 2021). Whether this impacted on our results is an unknown.…”

Dark Triad Traits, Social Position, and Personality: A Cross-Cultural Study

“…African or Arab cultures tended to have lower alpha coefficients. Note that these cultures also obtained low alphas for the ZKA-PQ and HEXACO in the same sample (Aluja et al, 2020; García et al, 2021).…”

“…Machiavellianism and Psychopathy were negatively associated with the Honesty-Humility facets of sincerity and equity, while Narcissism was most associated with deficits in greed avoidance and modesty. In addition, since the Dark Triad shows quite a large negative relationship with the Honesty-Humility factor of the HEXACO, and recent papers show that women score higher than men in Honesty-Humility (García et al, 2021; Lee & Ashton, 2020), it is expected that men will score higher than women in the Dark Triad. This effect is expected to be larger in western cultures, given the previous evidence of larger gender differences in these countries (García et al, 2021), compared to non-western ones.…”

“…In addition, since the Dark Triad shows quite a large negative relationship with the Honesty-Humility factor of the HEXACO, and recent papers show that women score higher than men in Honesty-Humility (García et al, 2021; Lee & Ashton, 2020), it is expected that men will score higher than women in the Dark Triad. This effect is expected to be larger in western cultures, given the previous evidence of larger gender differences in these countries (García et al, 2021), compared to non-western ones. This is the so-called Gender-Equality-Personality Paradox.…”