The study of personality and its transformation is a rather complicated topic. What exactly constitutes the factor people usually refer to as personality is a common question that used to be a hard one to answer in the field of psychology. The fundamental lexical hypothesis provides a scientific framework by which it is possible to formulate sufficient models to describe personalities. The hypothesis is founded upon two axioms: 1) personality traits that are significantly important will eventually become a part of language, and 2) significantly more important personality traits are more likely to be represented into language as a single word.
As a result of this framework, and with the use of statistical tools i.e. factor analysis, the Big Five model has emerged. It described one's personality using, obviously, five factors: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism. Since then, uncountable papers have been written that studies the different proprieties of the model and its relation with other factors. Furthermore, there have been a number of papers that works on developing the model (e.g. NEO Personality Inventory-Revised, Big Five Aspect Scale, Abridged Big Five Circumplex).
Despite that, these works focused on the original five dimensions and did not consider the possibility of an unnoticed personality traits; the HEXACO model tackles this issue. Through more studies across different languages, and with even more factor analysis tuning, it was possible find a sixth personality trait. The new trait was later named Honesty—Humbleness (usually referred to as just H).
The 'H factor' model was able to provide a more detailed relevant personality description. However, due to its relative recency, it is still severely lacking in terms of software that utilizes its advantages. As such, this simple collection of extensible Python scripts were created. The tools aim to be a helpful step towards more advanced creations of programmatic creativity.
git clone https://github.com/salastro/hexaco-person.git
cd hexaco-person
python3 src/take-test.py /path/to/answers.csv
python3 src/calculate-results.py /path/to/answers.csv /path/to/results.csv
python3 src/plot.py /path/to/results.csv
Lee, K., & Ashton, M. C. (2012). The H factor of personality. Wilfrid Laurier University Press.
Lee, K., & Ashton, M. C. (2016). Psychometric Properties of the HEXACO-100. Assessment, 25(5), 543–556. https://doi.org/10.1177/1073191116659134