1. What Does Honesty Look Like
What Does Honesty Look Like? A Personality Profile of Honest People Using the Big Five Facets
Kimberly K. Hardy1, Patrick Beach2, Stephen Crowley1, Jared L. Talley1, & Sharlynn Thompson3,
1Boise State University
2Missouri State University
3University of Colorado at Colorado Springs
RESEARCH QUESTIONS
Which Big Five Factors of Personality are associated with the personality traits of honesty and dishonesty?
2) Are honesty and dishonesty viewed as two ends of one dichotomous trait, or are they viewed as two separate traits?
RESULTS:
Table 1. Personality facets associated with honesty.
RESULTS
It appears that the typical honest person is perceived to be highly Agreeable and Conscientious, mildly Extraverted and Open, and not very Neurotic.
It appears that the typical dishonest person is perceived to be mildly Extraverted, Neurotic, and Open, and neither very Agreeable nor Conscientious.
Although participants tended to rate honest and dishonest people in an opposing manner for some traits, this was not a universal pattern for all traits associated with honesty or dishonest. There were no significant correlations between participants ratings of honest and dishonest people for the overarching factor of Extraversion or for the personality facets of Gregariousness, Assertiveness, Excitement, Self-Efficacy, Anxiety, Depression, or Self-Consciousness.
DISCUSSION
Consistent with previous research conceptualizing honesty as being worthy of its own overarching factor of personality [4], participants’ perceptions of an honest person did not fit neatly into one factor of the Big Five.
Although there was some degree of overlap between perceptions of honest and dishonest people, this was not the case for every single pairing of traits. Consistently, participants rated the honest person as scoring high on Agreeableness and Conscientiousness, whereas they rated the dishonest person as scoring low on facets associated with these traits. Therefore, there appears to be some support for honesty and dishonesty relating to opposing ends of an overarching factor.
However, consistent with research illustrating that honesty and dishonesty assess
different behaviors [1], there was no association between participant ratings of the
typical honest and dishonest person on facets of Extraversion and Neuroticism.
Additionally, because different factors were observed to embody the honest and dishonest person, it appears that, although these traits are similar in nature to each other, they are not measuring precisely the same traits.
Therefore, it appears that although honesty and dishonesty may be associated, they
are not opposite ends of one dichotomous trait.
Comparison
Variable t r d
Extraversion
8.72*
.05
.85
Friendliness
11.51*
-.19*
1.30
Assertiveness
6.16*
-.08
.64
Activity Level
5.16*
-.15*
.52
Cheerfulness
14.15*
-.24*
1.59
Agreeableness
22.49*
-.66*
2.96
Trust
21.17*
-.41*
2.60
Morality
25.93*
-.42*
3.15
Altruism
20.30*
-.50*
2.49
Cooperation
15.84*
-.44*
1.94
Modesty
9.24*
-.17*
1.03
Sympathy
15.47*
-.52*
1.91
Conscientiousness
22.33*
-.65*
2.90
Self-Efficacy
14.72*
-.13
1.60
Orderliness
8.22*
-.43*
.98
Dutifulness
33.95*
-.67*
4.49
Achievement
Striving
18.84*
-.53*
2.37
Self-Discipline
-.36*
1.73
Cautiousness
13.01*
-.44
1.61
Openness to Experience
7.54*
-.27*
.86
Artistic Interest
11.12*
1.36
Emotionality
15.18*
-.31*
1.74
Intellect
9.86*
1.14
INTRODUCTION
Honesty is an important dispositional quality that embodies telling the truth, respecting property, and honoring contracts [1]
Honesty is an important trait that most people view as desirable in partners, business associates, and themselves [2]
One of the most widely used models of personality, The Big Five Factor Model [3], does not incorporate the trait of honesty [4]
Therefore, one purpose of this study is to investigate if honesty closely aligns with facets central to one of the Big Five Factors
Additionally, because previous research using qualitative methods suggests that honesty and dishonesty are inherently different constructs [1], another aim of this project is to verify this finding using quantitative methods
METHOD
Participants and Procedure
198 participants (140 women, 57 men, 1 not reported) from a large Western
university completed online surveys for course credit
Participants provided informed consent prior to beginning the survey
Participants completed the survey online from a location of their choosing
The survey consisted of 3 sections. Participants were either presented with
questions asking them to rate an honest person or a dishonest person on
various items before responding to a set of demographic questions.
The honest and dishonest questions were presented to participants in a
random, counterbalanced order so that half of participants rated an honest
person first and half rated a dishonest person first
Participants were debriefed upon completion of the study
Measures: The Big Five Factors
Participants rated their perceptions of the typical honest and typical dishonest person using modified versions of the 120-item International Personality Item Pool Inventory [IPIP; 5]
The IPIP was modified so that participants responded to the prompt: “Please rate to what extent you believe that each statement below is descriptive of the typical HONEST person.” Participants were also given a similar prompt to rate the typical DISHONEST person.
Each individual item begin with the phrase: “An Honest (Dishonest) Person…”
Participants that rated to what extent they agreed with each item on a 5-point Likert-type scale ranging from 1 = Strongly Disagree to 5 = Strongly Agree
Responses were coded to reflect a higher degree of the trait of interest
The IPIP consists of 6 facets per Big Five Factor (Extraversion: friendliness, gregariousness, assertiveness, activity level, excitement, cheerfulness; Agreeableness: trust, morality, altruism, cooperation, modesty, sympathy; Conscientiousness: self-efficacy, orderliness, dutifulness, achievement striving, self-discipline, cautiousness; Neuroticism: anxiety, anger, depression, self-consciousness, immoderation, vulnerability; Openness: imagination, artistic interest, emotionality, adventurousness, intellect, liberalism).
4 items were used to assess each of the 6 facets per factor, for a total of 24 items per factor.
*p < .05; ┼ < .06.
REFERENCES
[1] Beach, P., Crowley, S., Hardy, K. K., Talley, J. L., & Thompson, S. (in preparation). A folk
conception of honesty: Empirical exploration into honesty and dishonesty.
[2] Weber, M. (2012). The role of character strengths in adolescent roSmantic relationships: An initial
study on partner selection and mates' life satisfaction. Journal of adolescence, 35,
[3] McCrae, R. R., & Costa, P. T. (1995). Trait explanations in personality psychology. European
Journal of Personality, 9, 4,
[4] Ashton, M. C., & Lee, K. (2005). Honesty-Humility, the Big Five, and the Five-Factor Model.
 Journal Of Personality, 73(5),  
[5] Goldberg, L. R. (1999). A broad-bandwidth, public-domain, personality inventory measuring the
lower-level facets of several five-factor models. In I. Mervielde, I. Deary, F. D. Fruyt, & F.
Ostendorf (Eds.), Personality psychology in Europe, vol. 7 (pp. 7–28). Tilburg University Press.
Table 2. Personality facets associated with dishonesty.
Comparison
Variable  t r d
Extraversion
Gregariousness
-1.93┼
-.06
-.22
Excitement
-9.12*
-.09
-.96
Neuroticism
-11.40*
-.25*
-1.31
Anxiety
-2.34*
-.10
-.28
Anger
-12.64*
-.35*
-1.50
Depression
-12.75*
-.12
-1.37
Immoderation
-11.80*
-.27*
-1.35
Vulnerability
-7.85*
-.15*
-.84
Openness to Experience
Imagination
-4.06*
.16*
-.38
Liberalism
-8.07*
-.41*
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Special thanks to research assistants Mackenzie Case, Sara Couture, Drew Lindgren, McKenzie Lyons, and Camille Tibbitts for their help with this project.
CONTACT INFORMATION
For more information about this presentation or about The Honesty Project Lab, please contact Dr. Kimberly K. Hardy at