Honesty-Humility is to Politeness as Agreeableness is to Agreeableness: A Reanalysis of Blötner (2025)

Abstract

Addressing ongoing disagreements regarding the independence of HEXACO Honesty-Humility from the Big Five taxonomy, Blötner provides comprehensive evidence for the empirical distinction between Big Five Agreeableness and HEXACO Honesty-Humility. Yet, prior disagreements have mostly focused on potential redundancy between Honesty-Humility and the Politeness aspect of Agreeableness, rather than the broad Agreeableness domain. In a reanalysis of the data from Blötner, we found that Honesty-Humility and Politeness were strongly correlated, not clearly structurally distinguishable, and showed negligible divergences in their nomological networks. This same pattern of results was produced between three common measures of Big Five Agreeableness, suggesting Honesty-Humility and Politeness might also represent different operationalisations of the same trait.

Keywords

honesty-humility politeness agreeableness construct redundancy jangle fallacy

Blötner (2025) presents a thorough analysis of the empirical distinction between HEXACO Honesty-Humility and various operationalisations of Big Five Agreeableness, drawing on four large German samples. Analyses of factor structure, construct validity, incremental validity, and degree of overlap between their nomological networks supported the conclusion that Honesty-Humility and Agreeableness are distinct constructs. We concur with this conclusion and commend Blötner’s methodological approach. At the same time, the central question Blötner addressed—concerning potential redundancy (or “jangle fallacy”) between Honesty-Humility and Big Five Agreeableness—does not appear especially salient in the relevant literature. The more pertinent question concerns the degree of overlap between Honesty-Humility and the Politeness aspect of Big Five Agreeableness, but this was not the focus of their analyses. We therefore extend Blötner’s analyses using the dataset for the fourth sample in their study (n = 1,799) from the Prosocial Personality Project (Thielmann et al., 2020) to address this question.

As Blötner (2025) notes, some researchers have argued that Honesty-Humility closely overlaps with the Politeness aspect of Big Five Agreeableness (DeYoung, 2015; DeYoung et al., 2007). Some have also found that Politeness and Honesty-Humility share identical patterns of correlations with external variables (Wilmot & Ones, 2022), and occupy similar locations within the Interpersonal Circumplex—a framework for interpersonal traits (Barford et al., 2015). Others have contested this view, concluding that Politeness “is only moderately correlated” with Honesty-Humility (Lee & Ashton, 2019, p. 166). The point being debated in these studies is not whether Honesty-Humility is redundant with Big Five Agreeableness at the broad domain level, but rather whether it reflects specific content of Agreeableness captured by Politeness at the narrower aspect level. Although Blötner did not examine this question directly, they found that items from Honesty-Humility and Politeness strongly loaded on the same factor in an exploratory factor analysis. In this reanalysis of data included in Blötner’s study, we build on this observation to further assess the empirical distinction between Honesty-Humility and Politeness. We also conduct the same analyses on three Big Five Agreeableness scales to provide a comparative benchmark; these being German translations of scales from the Big Five Aspect Scales (BFAS; Mussel & Paelecke, 2018), Big Five Inventory-2 (BFI-2; Danner et al., 2019), and NEO Five-Factor Inventory (NEO-FFI; Borkenau & Ostendorf, 2008).¹ Because these scales are intended to measure the same construct, results of these analyses illustrate the amount of overlap expected among different operationalisations of the same trait. If the overlap between Honesty-Humility and Politeness is comparable to that between the Big Five Agreeableness scales, this would suggest Honesty-Humility and Politeness also represent different operationalisations of the same trait.

Transparency, Openness, and Reproducibility

The tests conducted in this reanalysis were not preregistered and were therefore exploratory. Data from Blötner’s (2025) study (https://osf.io/5hd74) and code for our reanalysis (https://osf.io/ecvyz) are available on the Open Science Framework.

Latent Correlation and Structural Distinction

Blötner (2025) reports a latent correlation of ρ = .78 between Honesty-Humility from the HEXACO-60 (Ashton & Lee, 2009) and BFAS Agreeableness. Correlations around this strength indicate that two constructs substantially overlap or are even empirically redundant (Hodson, 2021; Lawson & Robins, 2021). Exploring further, we found this association is primarily driven by Politeness: when the higher-order factor of Agreeableness is removed from the model, Honesty-Humility correlates very strongly with Politeness, ρ = .76 (95% CI: .72, .80), but only moderately with Compassion, ρ = .44 (95% CI: .39, .49). Interestingly, Politeness correlates more strongly with Honesty-Humility than with Compassion, ρ = .55 (95% CI: .51, .59). When Compassion is also removed from the model, the correlation between Honesty-Humility and Politeness increases, ρ = .80 (95% CI: .76, .83). Moreover, this correlation increases further when HEXACO items measuring greed avoidance are removed, ρ = .86 (95% CI: .82, .89); greed avoidance represents a main source of conceptual difference between Honesty-Humility and Politeness (see the Supplemental Materials for a discussion on their conceptual overlap). The correlation between Honesty-Humility and Politeness is similar to that found between different measures of Honesty-Humility (Ashton et al., 2007). In comparison to the Agreeableness scales, BFAS and BFI-2 Agreeableness have a latent correlation of ρ = .90 (95% CI: .88, .91), with NEO-FFI and BFI-2 correlating slightly higher, ρ = .95 (95% CI: .94, .97), and NEO-FFI and BFAS correlating slightly lower, ρ = .85 (95% CI: .83, .87)—comparable to the correlation between Honesty-Humility and Politeness.

We then compared five confirmatory factor analysis models to assess the structural overlap between Honesty-Humility and Politeness. As in Blötner’s (2025) analyses, all models specified that Honesty-Humility items load on their respective facets (modesty, sincerity, greed avoidance, and fairness), and included a method factor to represent reverse-coding. The compared models included a one-factor model comprising Honesty-Humility facets and Politeness items loading on a single factor; a two-factor model comprising the Honesty-Humility facets and Politeness items loading on two separate factors; and a symmetrical bifactor model specifying Honesty-Humility facets and Politeness items loading on a single factor as well as specific factors which were constrained to be orthogonal. Two further models used bifactor(S – 1) modelling (Eid et al., 2017), which has been used to assess the structure of similar constructs in prior research (e.g., Burns et al., 2020; Parton & Chester, 2025). The bifactor(S – 1) models used were similar to the symmetrical bifactor model but removed one specific factor. The first removed the specific factor of Politeness, causing Politeness to define and provide reference for the general factor, thereby forcing Honesty-Humility to represent a subfactor of Politeness. The second removed the specific factor of Honesty-Humility, causing Honesty-Humility to define and provide reference for the general factor, thereby forcing Politeness to represent a subfactor of Honesty-Humility.

Fit indices of the five models are provided in Table 1. All models had poor fit, and loadings for one Politeness item (“Love a good fight”) were negative or close to zero across the models. The one-factor model fit the data as well as the two-factor model according to fit indices, suggesting Honesty-Humility and Politeness are not clearly structurally distinguishable. Similarly, pairs of Agreeableness scales also did not clearly fit better in one-factor models or two-factor models (see Table S2 in the Supplemental Materials), despite their intended measurement of the same construct. This suggests Honesty-Humility and Politeness are as structurally comparable as these different operationalisations of Agreeableness. The symmetrical bifactor model provided the best fit of the five models but produced anomalous results, such as the modesty facet negatively loading on the specific Honesty-Humility factor. Both bifactor(S – 1) models fit the data better than the one-factor and two-factor models, but the bifactor(S – 1) model with Honesty-Humility as the reference domain provided the best fit to the data and did not yield anomalous results beyond the one Politeness item with consistently poor factor loadings. These results indicate substantial structural overlap between Politeness and Honesty-Humility, and suggests Politeness can be relatively best understood as assessing content within Honesty-Humility.

Table 1.

Fit Statistics of the Confirmatory Factor Analysis Models

Model	χ²	df	CFI	RMSEA	SRMR
Single factor	1759.82	154	.86	.075 [.071, .079]	.06
Two correlated factors	1543.62	153	.86	.075 [.071, .078]	.06
Symmetrical bifactor	1046.19	140	.90	.067 [.063, .071]	.04
Bifactor(S – 1): Politeness as reference	1459.94	150	.87	.072 [.069, .076]	.05
Bifactor(S – 1): Honesty-Humility as reference	1094.75	144	.89	.067 [.063, .071]	.04

Note. All χ² tests are statistically significant at p < .001. Values in the brackets represent 90% confidence intervals. CFI = comparative fit index; RMSEA = root mean square error of approximation; SRMR = standardised root mean square residual.

Nomological Network Overlap and Incremental Validity

To compare the nomological networks of Honesty-Humility and Politeness, we conducted tests of the difference between dependent correlations and compared the incremental validity of each trait. Deviating from Blötner’s (2025) analyses, we conducted these analyses with structural equation modelling using the ΔR² function from Hayes (2021), thereby accounting for measurement error and mitigating the inflated risk of making false positive conclusions when testing incremental validity (Westfall & Yarkoni, 2016). We additionally calculated Cohen’s q to represent the effect size difference between correlations, similarly used p < .001 as the criterion to indicate statistical significance, and considered ΔR² > .05 to indicate a non-negligible amount of additional explained variance (Thielmann & Hilbig, 2019). For further details on the outcome variables and analysis plan, see Blötner (2025).

Results are presented in Table 2, showing Politeness and Honesty-Humility significantly differ in their correlations with 11 of the 20 variables theoretically related to Agreeableness and/or Honesty-Humility. However, these differences were generally negligible to small (median Cohen’s q = .07), and showed near identical correlation profiles overall (rICC_DE = .95), similar to past findings (Wilmot & Ones, 2022). A proposed key difference between Honesty-Humility and Big Five Agreeableness is that Honesty-Humility better covers the common variance of dark traits (Lee & Ashton, 2014). Yet, both Blötner’s analyses and ours yielded mixed evidence for this distinction. In our comparison to the aspect of Politeness, Honesty-Humility correlated more strongly with Machiavellianism, but Politeness correlated more strongly with psychopathy and sadism, and both were equally strongly correlated with narcissism. The difference in their correlation with the common core of the four dark traits was also small and not significantly different.² Beyond these variables, there were no further distinctive patterns to note, except for Politeness being more strongly correlated with aggression and anger. Reflecting their similar nomological networks, both Politeness (median ΔR² = .02) and Honesty-Humility (median ΔR² = .01) generally explained a negligible amount of additional variance in the external variables over one another.

Table 2.

Latent Dependent Correlations and Incremental Validity of Politeness and Honesty-Humility

Outcome	Dependent correlations					Total R²	ΔR²
Outcome	Pol.	HH	z	p	q	Total R²	Pol.	HH
Dark traits (composite)	−.83	−.80	−1.80	.071	−.11	.74	.10	.04
Machiavellianism	−.62	−.70	5.95	<.001	.15	.49	.00	.11
Narcissism	−.58	−.58	0.06	.953	.00	.37	.03	.03
Psychopathy	−.80	−.70	−5.49	<.001	−.21	.64	.15	.01
Sadism	−.64	−.51	−9.99	<.001	−.19	.40	.15	.00
Positive reciprocity	.37	.26	8.44	<.001	.13	.14	.08	.01
Negative reciprocity	−.52	−.56	3.02	.003	.05	.32	.01	.05
Forgiveness	.47	.46	0.91	.364	.01	.24	.03	.02
Vengeance	−.58	−.60	1.89	.058	.04	.38	.02	.05
Physical aggression	−.60	−.50	−8.49	<.001	−.16	.36	.12	.00
Verbal aggression	−.63	−.31	−25.40	<.001	−.42	.51	.41	.12
Anger	−.59	−.43	−12.73	<.001	−.22	.35	.17	.01
Mistrust	−.38	−.41	1.95	.051	.03	.17	.01	.03
Trust propensity	.25	.24	0.39	.694	.01	.07	.01	.00
Affective empathy	.53	.44	7.50	<.001	.12	.28	.09	.00
Cognitive empathy	.43	.36	5.40	<.001	.08	.18	.05	.00
SDO	−.39	−.44	4.38	<.001	.07	.19	.00	.05
Cynicism	−.21	−.29	5.62	<.001	.08	.08	.00	.04
Impulsivity
Attention	−.32	−.32	0.55	.585	.01	.11	.01	.01
Non-planning	−.08	−.05	−2.39	.017	−.03	.01	.01	.00
Motor	−.22	−.20	−1.29	.196	−.02	.05	.01	.00

Note. Values in ΔR² columns display the additional variance explained by each trait over the other trait. HH = Honesty-Humility; Pol. = Politeness; SDO = Social dominance orientation.

For comparison, tests of the difference between dependent correlations and incremental validity of the BFAS, NEO-FFI, and BFI-2 measures of Agreeableness were also conducted (see Tables S3–S5 in the Supplemental Materials). The number of statistically significant dependent correlation differences ranged from 11 to 17 across the Agreeableness pairs, and these differences were generally negligible to small (median Cohen’s q ranged from .06 to .12). Their overall correlation profiles were nearly identical (rICC_DE ranged from .95 to .97), and incremental validity was generally negligible (median ΔR² ranged from .01 to .08). In comparison to the differences between Agreeableness measures, Honesty-Humility and Politeness showed a similar number of correlation differences with similar strength in their differences, similar overall correlation profiles, and similarly negligible to small incremental validity. That is, Honesty-Humility and Politeness were highly similar in their correlations and predictions of theoretically relevant external outcomes, and differed only as much as different measures of Big Five Agreeableness differed from one another.

Notably, these comparisons show fairly strong incremental validity for some outcomes, although these observations should be interpreted with caution. Some differences are to be expected since the traits slightly differ in which prosocial tendencies are emphasised. For example, BFI-2 Agreeableness explains an additional 43% of variance in trust propensity over BFAS Agreeableness, likely because BFI-2 (but not BFAS) contains a facet measuring trust (DeYoung et al., 2007; Soto & John, 2017). Politeness explains more variance in aggression beyond Honesty-Humility, likely because Politeness additionally contains content related to cooperation (as discussed in the Supplemental Materials). Nevertheless, across the broad set of outcomes contained in this dataset, the Agreeableness scales and the Politeness and Honesty-Humility scales showed generally little incremental validity, supporting the conclusion that they represent different operationalisations of the same traits. This reflects the fact that tests of incremental validity are strongly influenced by the selected outcome variables, and illustrates why incremental validity should be interpreted across a broad range of criteria, both conceptually relevant and conceptually irrelevant, rather than a few specific variables (Lawson & Robins, 2021; Thielmann & Hilbig, 2019).

Conclusion

Blötner (2025) provides clear evidence that HEXACO Honesty-Humility is mostly distinct from various operationalisations of Big Five Agreeableness. Yet, the question that seems more salient in debates between HEXACO and Big Five advocates is whether Honesty-Humility is distinct from the Politeness aspect of Big Five Agreeableness. Repeating the same analyses using the same data as Blötner, we found that Honesty-Humility is not clearly distinguishable from the Politeness aspect of Agreeableness. This overlap may be attributed to Politeness entailing modesty and straightforwardness (DeYoung et al., 2007), content which is also captured at the facet level in more comprehensive measures of Agreeableness (Costa & McCrae, 1992; Maples et al., 2014; Watson et al., 2019) and its polar opposite construct Antagonism (Krueger et al., 2012; Simms et al., 2011).

Yet, there are also grounds for arguing that these traits are closely related but not identical. For instance, Honesty-Humility contains some content that is not clearly captured by Politeness (i.e., greed avoidance), and the relatively best fitting structural model represented Politeness below Honesty-Humility—in line with its identification as an aspect-level trait residing below domains within the trait hierarchy. In addition, one might argue that our results do not demonstrate the similarity of Politeness and Honesty-Humility, but rather the distinctiveness of different measures of Agreeableness (see Hilbig & Moshagen, 2025). However, our analyses do not support this view. The three Agreeableness scales in this data showed a degree of correlational, structural, and nomological convergence that would be expected between measures of the same construct (Lawson & Robins, 2021); a pattern of overlap also shared between Honesty-Humility and Politeness. Thus, our results give some credence to the view that Honesty-Humility and Politeness may represent the same underlying construct, at least insofar as different measures of Agreeableness represent the same underlying construct.

Supplemental Material

Supplemental Material - Honesty-Humility is to Politeness as Agreeableness is to Agreeableness: A Reanalysis of Blötner (2025)

Supplemental Material for Honesty-Humility is to Politeness as Agreeableness is to Agreeableness: A Reanalysis of Blötner (2025) by Rhys Davies Noulton, Luke D. Smillie in Personality Science.

Footnotes

Author’s Note

Not applicable.

Acknowledgements

Not applicable.

ORCID iD

Rhys Davies Noulton

Author Contributions

Rhys Davies Noulton: Conceptualization; Formal analysis; Methodology; Writing - original draft; Writing - review & editing

Luke D. Smillie: Supervision; Writing - review & editing

Data Availability Statement

Data for Blötner's (2025) study (https://osf.io/5hd74), and the analytic code and supplementary material for this study () are available from the Open Science Framework.

Supplemental Material

Supplemental material for this article is available online. Depending on the article type, these usually include a Transparency Checklist, a Transparent Peer Review File, and optional materials from the authors.

Notes

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