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HEXACO-60

HEXACO-60
psychologysocial sciencesFree for research use

Permission: Free for research use. Free for non-commercial academic research, with no license fee. Cite the original publication.

A 60-item short form of the HEXACO Personality Inventory measuring six broad dimensions: Honesty-Humility (H), Emotionality (E), eXtraversion (X), Agreeableness (A), Conscientiousness (C), and Openness to Experience (O). Adds a sixth factor (H) to the Big Five and reframes Agreeableness and Emotionality around the moral and affective components of interpersonal behavior.

Items
60
Response format
5-point Likert scale
Version
1.0
Subscales
6

Ready-to-cite methods sentence

Personality was measured with the HEXACO-60 (Ashton & Lee, 2009), a 60-item short form of the HEXACO Personality Inventory-Revised that assesses six dimensions (Honesty-Humility, Emotionality, eXtraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Openness to Experience) on a 5-point Likert scale. Subscale scores were computed as the mean of 10 items after reverse-scoring the flagged items.

Citing this in a methods section? See the APA 7 guide (Author–date citations for psychology and the social sciences). Or compare all six citation styles.

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Reliability & validation

Validation population
Canadian college students (N = 936) and Oregon community adults (N = 734) reported in Ashton & Lee (2009)
Subscale alphas
0.77–0.80
Cronbach alpha range
0.73–0.80

Subscales

Honesty-HumilityEmotionalityeXtraversionAgreeablenessConscientiousnessOpenness to Experience

Response anchors

Strongly disagree · Disagree · Neutral · Agree · Strongly agree

Known limitations

Researchers should verify the reverse-scoring key against the Appendix of Ashton and Lee (2009) before data analysis; the HEXACO-60 uses a different keying pattern from the Big Five. Cross-cultural validation is extensive but not universal, so check for a validated translation before using a non-English version.

Original citation

Ashton, M. C., & Lee, K. (2009). The HEXACO-60: A short measure of the major dimensions of personality. Journal of Personality Assessment, 91(4), 340-345.

https://doi.org/10.1080/00223890902935878

Questions researchers ask

What does the HEXACO-60 measure?

A 60-item short form of the HEXACO Personality Inventory measuring six broad dimensions: Honesty-Humility (H), Emotionality (E), eXtraversion (X), Agreeableness (A), Conscientiousness (C), and Openness to Experience (O). Adds a sixth factor (H) to the Big Five and reframes Agreeableness and Emotionality around the mora…

How many items does the HEXACO-60 have?

The HEXACO-60 (HEXACO-60) has 60 items across 6 subscales: Honesty-Humility, Emotionality, eXtraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Openness to Experience.

Is the HEXACO-60 free to use?

The HEXACO-60 is free to use for non-commercial academic research. You don't need to pay a license fee, but you should always cite the original publication.

Who developed the HEXACO-60, and how do I cite it?

Ashton, M. C., & Lee, K. (2009). The HEXACO-60: A short measure of the major dimensions of personality. Journal of Personality Assessment, 91(4), 340-345. https://doi.org/10.1080/00223890902935878

Or track new research mentioning HEXACO-60 as it publishes

Related scales

BFI-44Big Five InventoryBFI-2Big Five Inventory-2Mini-IPIPMini-IPIPTIPITen-Item Personality InventoryBFNEBrief Fear of Negative Evaluation ScaleNFC-SFNeed for Cognition Scale (Short Form)

Library entry verified September 2026. Metadata is provided for reference. Questionnaires are built in Folio Surveyor, subject to each instrument's licensing, and can be taken to Qualtrics, Google Forms or Microsoft Forms, with their CSV responses brought back for scoring.