The H factor of personality: Why some people are manipulative and why it matters

[Hesper]

Laura recently recommended reading The H Factor of Personality: Why some people are manipulative, self-entitled, materialistic, and exploitive—and why it matters for everyone. It's a short and easy read. The chapters are as follows:
[list type=decimal]
[*]Meet the H Factor
[*]The Missing Link of Personality Psychology
[*]HEXACO: The Six Dimensions of Personality
[*]A Field Guide to Low-H People
[*]Can You Tell Someone’s Level of H?
[*]Do High-H People Flock Together?
[*]Politics
[*]Religion
[*]Money, Power, and Sex
[*]How to Identify Low-H People—and How to Live Around Them
[*]Epilogue: On Becoming a High-H Person
[/list]

The authors begin the book by identifying some of the original research that led to the Big 5 personality inventory, and why they believe it wasn't the 'end' of understanding personality structure. Modern personality research is based on grouping adjectives used to describe people into overall personality traits. Some psychologists see 3 as sufficient, others 5, but the authors have made a compelling case for including a 6th. As we'll see this 6th factor comes much closer to revealing a person's 'moral endoskeleton' and being able to spot it is therefore very valuable.

The authors note that psychologists missed this 6th dimension due to at least two factors: the Big Five was based on a study of only the English language and it was based on a short list of traits before powerful computers could analyze longer ones. When the authors used the Korean language to search for adjectives they found a new dimension, with words like 'sincere, frank, honest, and unassuming' opposed to 'sly, calculating, hypocritical, flattering,' etc. They use a short vignette that illustrates the missing dimension to the Big 5 personality scale:

Mary and Jane have a lot in common. Both are young women in their last year of study at the same law school. Each grew up in a two-parent family in a middle-class neighbourhood. Yet in some crucial ways they could hardly be more different.
To Mary, the law is like a martial art—a way to defeat opponents by mastering many complex manoeuvres. She chose law as a career because she wanted to make a lot of money, and with that aim in mind she has mainly studied the more lucrative legal specialties, such as corporate law and litigation. To achieve her career goals, Mary has made a point of skilfully ingratiating herself to certain influential professors. By applying just the right amount of flattery, she hopes to make the connections she needs for a good position after completing her degree.

Jane’s approach to the law is much more idealistic. She views the law as a means of achieving justice, and her goals in studying law are to help people and to make a difference. She’s trying to decide whether to work in the criminal justice system as a prosecutor or public defender, or to work for a not-for-profit organization. Jane has had some contact with her professors, chiefly when she has asked them to explain some of the finer points of the law. She tries to be pleasant and polite with her professors, but she would be uncomfortable trying to curry favour with them.

Mary and Jane are both single, but both plan to marry someday. For Mary, any prospective husband must hold some prestigious position in society; besides being wealthy, he should carry the trappings and the appearance of a very important man. Anything less just wouldn’t be worthy of her. For Jane, these considerations of money and status don’t really matter. She’s much more concerned with finding a man she can love, and although she might not realize it, this will probably mean a man who shares her values.

As with Mary and Jane, Bill and Dave are similar in some ways. They’re both middle-aged men, and both own small automobile repair shops in towns just an hour’s drive apart. But again, in some ways they are opposites of each other.

Bill and Dave have entirely different outlooks on how to run a business. Bill’s motto could be summed up as “Let the buyer beware”: when customers come to his shop, he’ll often recommend repairs that aren’t really necessary, and he’ll often save money by substituting lower-quality parts for those that are intended for a given vehicle. Often, if Bill judges that a customer will take the deal, he offers to do the work for cash, so that no receipts are kept and no taxes are paid.

Dave, by contrast, never deceives his customers or the tax authorities. He recommends only the repairs that are really required, which often means that his customers have less repair work done than they thought they would need. The parts he uses are always as stated on the invoice to the customer. Every transaction is recorded for tax purposes.

Both Bill and Dave are active in their local communities, but here again their styles are a study in contrasts. Bill was recently elected president of his town’s minor sports association, and since assuming office he has been quite impressed with his own importance. He’s very generous to himself in claiming expenses associated with his duties, and he likes to have his name on many plaques and newspaper articles. Dave, on the other hand, has done a lot of volunteer work for his local sports association, but he often pays out of his own pocket, and he certainly doesn’t look for special recognition.

Finally, Bill and Dave differ in their married lives. Over the years, Bill has carried on a series of affairs; from his perspective, a virile and successful man such as himself is entitled to some extramarital excitement. (His wife wouldn’t share this point of view, so he must be crafty enough to conceal these adventures from her—and also from any husbands of his mistresses.) Dave, by contrast, has never cheated on his wife. He finds other women attractive, and he could likely find a willing partner rather easily, but he simply couldn’t bring himself to betray his wife’s trust.

The above vignettes illustrate the opposite extremes of a dimension of personality: Mary and Bill are at one end, Jane and Dave at the other. We call this personality dimension the H factor. The “H” stands for Honesty-Humility, and it’s one of only six basic dimensions of personality. In this book, we’ll tell you about all six of those dimensions—the HEXACO personality factors—but the H factor will be our main focus.

The H factor hadn’t been recognized by psychologists until about the year 2000. Back then, most of them believed that people’s personalities could best be summarized in terms of exactly five dimensions. Those five personality dimensions, known collectively as the Big Five, don’t fully capture the H factor, and therefore they can only partly capture the differences between Mary and Jane and between Bill and Dave.

Research in the past decade has shown how the H factor matters in many aspects of people’s lives. It underlies their approaches toward money, power, and sex. It governs their inclination to commit crimes or obey the law. It orients them toward certain attitudes about society, politics, and religion. It influences their choice of friends and spouse. Throughout this book, we’ll be explaining the role of the H factor in these various domains of life.

The authors note a fundamental difference between two main groups of personality factors - Openness, Conscientiousness and Extraversion each describe a degree of 'business' or interaction with the outside world. They write that, "For O, C, and X, persons with a higher level of the dimension tend to be more actively engaged in a certain area of endeavour than are persons with lower levels. What makes the three trait categories different from one another is that each involves a different kind of endeavour." But for Humility-Honesty, Agreeableness and Emotionality, rather than being focused on 'business,' the focus is on an altruistic vs. antagonistic tendency. They write:

Unlike the situation for O, C, and X, there’s no clear tendency for either pole of H, A, or E to be busier or more engaged than the other. Instead, H, A, and E each involve a contrast between an “altruistic” tendency (at the high pole) and an “antagonistic” tendency (at the low pole). But these three factors relate to altruism and antagonism in different ways.

People with high Honesty-Humility avoid exploiting, manipulating, or deceiving others. Authors write that "High-H people are much less likely to commit crimes of various sorts. They generally give others their fair share even when they could get away with not doing so, and even when the others are strangers. They are much more likely to favour ethics over profit and much less likely to be sexually unfaithful or sexually exploitive."

An important benefit of being high in H is that by treating people fairly, one can gain the benefits of future cooperation with others. In other words, when you don’t take advantage of others, people generally come to trust and cooperate with you. The cooperation of others can make a more satisfying life in modern society, but in many pre-modern settings this “bank account” of cooperation could be crucial for improving the odds of surviving and reproducing. The low-H person, by contrast, undermines the goodwill of others, thereby losing their cooperation and even provoking their active retaliation.

A Field Guide to Low-H People

In Chapter 4 the authors do a step-by-step analysis of how each factor relates to Honesty and Humility. Those with low Emotionality and low H have a lot of greed and not a lot of fear. The authors write that they're power hungry without an appreciation of harm. They write that "t’s low-H, low-E people who take the biggest chances in pursuit of fame and fortune. They want to win it all or die trying." They are very dangerous individuals of the dark triad variety.

However when you factor in low H and high Emotionality you get a very different picture. The authors write:

Compared with people who are low in both Honesty-Humility and Emotionality, people who combine low H with high E are not nearly so dangerous. They are much more fearful, so they don’t do so much status-driven risk taking. They are also much less insensitive, so they usually don’t treat people in quite such a hard-hearted way.

But the combination of low H and high E can still cause problems. Low-H, high-E people will try to exploit others, but they will do so in subtle, sneaky ways in order to avoid any confrontation or other risk of harm. A low-H, low-E person would risk a real fight; a low-H, high-E person would prefer to sneak away. When watching a low-H, high-E person in action, the words “weasel” and “coward” come to mind. In some ways, the combination of low H and high E is exactly opposite to the popular image of a hero. In the typical action movie, the good guy—usually a police officer or a secret agent—is always tough and brave. This high-H, low-E character is not a particularly sensitive soul, but he—virtually always a “he”—is incorruptible, with a strong sense of justice.

And low H and Low Agreeableness:

People who combine low Honesty-Humility and low Agreeableness are very difficult to get along with. On the one hand, they’re inclined to manipulate and exploit you. On the other, they’re always getting angry at your attempts (or at least, what they claim to see as your attempts) to exploit them. [...]What this means is that the combination of low H and low A reveals itself in many familiar personality traits. One such trait is aggressiveness: low-H, low-A people are chronically involved in conflicts. Their readiness to offend is matched only by their readiness to take offence.

These individuals are always keen on 'getting even' - they're drama queens. Low H and High A leads to people who aren't nearly as combative but are still manipulative, being predominantly fake in their interactions with others in order to get what they want.

Individuals with low Conscientiousness and low Honesty-Humility are no good delinquents. The authors write:

Even if they’re treated well by their employer and their co-workers, they won’t have much sense of responsibility or loyalty to them. And this extends beyond simply being an unreliable worker. The low-H, low-C employee is the one who is most likely to steal money or merchandise from the workplace.

The delinquent tendencies of low-H, low-C persons aren’t confined to the workplace. People who have both the exploitiveness of low H and the impulsiveness of low C are doubly inclined toward criminal behaviour in general. On the one hand, they’re strongly tempted to take what they want from others, whether by force or by fraud; they’re looking out for number one. On the other, they lack the self-control to inhibit these urges even when they’d be better off—from their own selfish perspective—to keep their impulses in check.

But add high levels of Conscientiousness and you find a person who is focused on personal ambition, who can sacrifice and work relentlessly for themselves but without any sense of loyalty to others.

Individuals with low Honesty and low Openness are described as shallow, superficial, and tacky.

The blend of low H and low O also comes with a particular set of attitudes about how others are to be treated. Low-H people are inclined to exploit others, and low-O people find it hard to relate to those whose backgrounds are different from their own. When low H and low O are combined, the result is a person who is especially ready to take advantage of those who seem different or strange or alien. Now, low-H, low-O people might feel some discomfort about being too ruthless in taking advantage of people who look and talk and think like they do. After all, the community has certain standards about how things are done, and one doesn’t want to look bad. But when it comes to those far away, or those too different to identify with, or those not protected by community norms, there is no holding back. Moral considerations don’t apply to outsiders.

Those with high Openness and low Humility sound like a stereotypical 'academic' who is divorced from the common people and yet has no real understanding of the world:

A more common expression of low H and high O is snobbery of an artistic or intellectual kind. People low in H and high in O love to show how cultured and learned they are. They enjoy putting big words together, especially when those big words are currently becoming stylish; it doesn’t matter so much whether the long string of big words actually makes much sense. You could say that their hermeneutic discourse is informed by the extant paradigms of pedagogy and governance, or something like that. We suspect that intellectual movements such as postmodernism hold a special attraction for low-H, high-O people.

For low-H, high-O people, the arts are partly an expression of the human condition, but partly just a vehicle for showing off their originality. They wear their artistic talent like a badge, often flaunting it as a way of establishing their superiority. And particularly where male artists are concerned, that talent is deployed as a tool for seducing impressionable women (or, depending on their tastes, for seducing impressionable men).

What each of these portrayals has in common is a low level of Honesty-Humility. And clearly this factor goes a long way in determining whether high conscientiousness, agreeableness, extraversion etc are 'good' or 'bad'. It seems like In the following chapters the authors look at the influence this has on politics and religion, and how the H factor influences both. As for religion, the authors note that high-H people are slightly more likely than low-H people to be religious, writing that "[A] likely reason for this link (and for the similar links of the A and E factors with religiosity) is that soft-hearted, sympathetic people tend to favour the ideas that people have souls that will survive their bodies and that people who are separated by death will meet in an afterlife." In other words there is a great motivation to be a good person when one believes that, intrinsically, such choices matter. In a society brainwashed into believing that's a load of hogwash it's no wonder so many people become character disturbed.

How to tell someone's level of H

The authors note that people make good judgments about other personality factors for people they only know moderately well, but that reports for H are much less accurate. They note that H is the last thing you learn about a person - and for most of us it's really the defining trait of who we are. It seems to me to be, deep down, a mark of character that determines the orientation of other personality traits. They note that impression management makes it extraordinarily difficult to identify levels of H, using a workplace study to make the point:

Why is it difficult to judge accurately the levels of H of your co-workers? It may be because everyday interactions in the workplace don’t give many valid clues about people’s levels of the H factor. Most workplaces don’t offer many situations that let you see plainly which people are high in H and which people are low. Another reason is that people tend not to reveal their levels of H in the workplace: many low-H people make a calculated effort to come across as upstanding employees, but few high-H people do so, which makes it very hard to tell which people are which. (By contrast, people are less willing or less able to manage their impressions all of the time, so their friends and spouses and relatives will generally get a pretty good idea of their level of H.) Anyhow, the results of our research suggest that it would be easy to trust co-workers too much—or even to trust them too little—based on the limited information you typically get in the workplace.

To sum up, people are pretty accurate in judging the personalities of those who are close to them—the persons they know well. And for many aspects of personality, people can still make accurate judgments even for people they don’t know so well—such as their more distant social acquaintances, or their co-workers. But apparently, this doesn’t apply to the H factor: to be really accurate in judging a person’s level of H, you usually need to know that person very well.

To get around this the authors discovered that people tend to group together around Openness and Honesty-Humility, saying that we can probably get a good idea of a person's level of both by averaging their closest friends' levels of each factor.

When we looked at the correlations between the self-reports of the two friends of each pair, we found that the friends were usually somewhat similar in two of the HEXACO factors: H and O. The degree of similarity was only modest: the correlations were about .25 for both factors. But for the other four factors, there was very little similarity. What this meant was that the more genuine and unassuming university students (those high in H) tended to find each other as friends—at least at a somewhat higher-than-chance level—and that the more devious and pretentious university students (those low in H) tended to do the same.

Likewise, the more inquisitive and complex university students (those high in O) also tended (somewhat) to attract each other as friends, as did the more conventional and unimaginative university students (those low in O). Maybe this doesn’t sound so surprising, but what makes these results so interesting is that for the other four personality factors, this tendency was much weaker. For those other dimensions, it was as if the friend pairs were forming almost at random.

The results were even more striking when we examined the amount of perceived similarity between friends, by checking the correlations between people’s self-reports and their observer reports about their friends: people perceived their friends as being quite similar to them in the H and O factors, with correlations around .40 (a bit higher for H and a bit lower for O). In other words, the perceived similarity between friends for H and O was even greater than the actual similarity. But for the other four factors, there was no such perceived similarity.

The authors also include a list of invalid vs. valid signs of high or low Humility-Honesty. Valid signs of Low H include:

• Sexual Infidelity: Cheating on one's spouse is a sure sign of low H
• Beating the System: People who will cheat the 'system' will cheat you too
• Instrumental Ingratiation: People who are selectively nice to those useful to them are not likely to be loyal
• Gambling and Financial Speculation: The authors write that "people who regularly risk a lot of money in gambling or speculation probably have a strong desire to get rich quickly or to get something for nothing."
  [*]Conspicuous Consumption (and Name Dropping): People who display wealth and popularity ostentatiously are notorious for having low levels of H
  [*]“Above the Law” Mentality: The authors note that, "Some people decide that they belong to a special class of persons to whom the normal rules should not apply."
  [*]Contempt of Other Groups: Low H people are more likely to mock and denigrate 'outside' groups in a not-so good-natured way
  

And, if stuck in a situation with Low-H people the authors recommend limiting interaction, aligning interests as to minimize backlash from the low H person, and aligning one's self with high H people. In order to become a high H person the authors include a personality inventory for self-scoring.

Overall a very good read. This is just a very rough overview and there is a lot to chew on.