The H Factor

The H Factor may sound like a sci-fi TV show, but it’s a  - certainly not much less exciting - accessible book by Keebom Lee and Michael Ashton about their HEXACO model of personality:  The H Factor of Personality: Why Some People Are Manipulative, Self-Entitled, Materialistic, and Exploitive and Why It Matters for Everyone (2012). The authors briefly describe how they discovered the H (honesty-humility) factor and added it to the Five-Factor (OCEAN) model and then go on to provide an interesting mix of theoretical ideas and practical examples (e.g. the personality traits of a con-man) and case studies.

Low H would predict a number of socially rather less desirable traits

• Power-hungry
• Greed
• Deceitfulness
• Manipulativeness
• Low paternal investment (“cads”)

While the authors often take an evolutionary approach, they don’t answer the question about the evolutionary origin of high or low H. People who are familiar with my writing will be able to guess my answer. These traits are tied to two transitions in human history:

• Transition from foraging to food production
• Transition from egalitarianism to hierarchical social organization

In brief, low H was allowed to flourish in the transition from hunting and gathering to farming and herding. While forager people may not always be angels (they fight over women, just like everyone else), there are no material possessions and power structures. African settlers loved to employ foragers because they were known not to steal. Occasionally the best hunters manage to attract two partners, but otherwise, monogamy is common and men help with parenting.  

Due to assortative mating, the original subsistence types live on in what has been known as the four temperaments since antiquity:

As farmer types are the majority of people and we basically live in a farmer world, it is hard to maintain low humidity levels even for forager types (Sheldon Cooper may serve as a fictional example). What Sheldon does have: honesty. Like for almost all people on the spectrum, lying is something that doesn’t come naturally to neurodiverse people. I have argued that most neurodiverse people are forager types. With low social intelligence and a lack of programming for hierarchy they often feel like they were born on the wrong planet. Just to make clear, social hierarchy is not evil in itself, it is what helped early farmers survive and thrive. However, it requires a lot of programming that does not come with egalitarianism:

• An intuitive understanding of how people are ranked
• Making alliances
• Lying for the sake of social peace
• Lying for the sake of personal profit
• Knowing a lot more social information than in forager societies (gossiping)
• Knowing how to deal with superiors and authority

In brief, it’s not hard to see how people with autism struggle in a farmer-herder world. Even finding out who to trust or not is a daunting task and one of the main reasons why social anxiety is so common among people with ASD.

Back to the book. One interesting theoretical distinction the authors make in The H Factor is between three types of action orientation

C: hard routine work, practical, conscientiousness avoids pathogen, delayed gratification

X: forming alliances, risk-taking, higher sociosexuality, spontaneity

O: tendency to engage in idea-related endeavours: high-O people become deeply absorbed in contemplation of art and nature. They want to understand the human and natural world. They generate new ideas and look for new solutions to old problems.

and three types of altruistic orientation.

These latter tendencies didn’t have a place of their own in the Big Five model. But when the sixth factor was found, everything fell neatly into line: there was one factor for traits that promote

E: kin altruism

A: the “patient” kind of reciprocal altruism (i.e. you expect future return)

H: the “fair” kind of reciprocal altruism (i.e. you are altruistic even when there is no likelihood of direct reciprocity)

It’s not too hard to integrate the HEXACO model into my model of evolutionary personality types based on subsistence and life history strategy.

	pastoralists	farmers	foragers
action orientation	X	C	O
altruism orientation	E	A	H
life history strategy	faster	medium	slower

Openness may be the hardest to accept as a forager trait as foragers are not the “theoretical and philosophical kind of people” high O people often are in western societies. However, they have a lot in common:  exploring new habitats, knowledge about thousands of plant and animal species and their properties, lifelong learning - perfecting hunting skills.

Of course, the traits are more about evolutionary fine-tuning than the origin of the traits themselves. Moreover, high emotionality would only be true for the caregiving (female) profile of pastoralists, as the provisioning male profile would have to be very low in E according to life-history theory (i.e. risk-taking).

I haven’t seen much scientific research using the HEXACO model rather than the OCEAN model, but I am certainly looking forward to seeing more in the future.