What Does Honesty Look Like A Personality Profile

What Does Honesty Look Like? A Personality Profile of Honest People Using the Big Five Facets 1 2 1 1 3 Kimberly K. Hardy , Patrick Beach , Stephen Crowley , Jared L. Talley , & Sharlynn Thompson , 1 Boise State University 2 Missouri State University 3 University of Colorado at Colorado Springs RESEARCH QUESTIONS RESULTS: 1) 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? 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. Table 1. Personality facets associated with honesty. Variable RESULTS Comparison r t 1 Boise State University d Extraversion Friendliness Assertiveness Activity Level Cheerfulness Agreeableness Trust Morality Altruism Cooperation Modesty Sympathy Conscientiousness Self-Efficacy Orderliness Dutifulness Achievement Striving Self-Discipline Cautiousness Openness to Experience 8. 72* 11. 51* 6. 16* 5. 16* 14. 15* 22. 49* 21. 17* 25. 93* 20. 30* 15. 84* 9. 24* 15. 47* 22. 33* 14. 72* 8. 22* 33. 95* 18. 84* . 05 -. 19* -. 08 -. 15* -. 24* -. 66* -. 41* -. 42* -. 50* -. 44* -. 17* -. 52* -. 65* -. 13 -. 43* -. 67* -. 53* . 85 1. 30. 64. 52 1. 59 2. 96 2. 60 3. 15 2. 49 1. 94 1. 03 1. 91 2. 90 1. 60. 98 4. 49 2. 37 14. 72* 13. 01* 7. 54* -. 36* -. 44 -. 27* 1. 73 1. 61. 86 Artistic Interest Emotionality Intellect 11. 12* 15. 18* 9. 86* -. 42* -. 31* -. 27* 1. 36 1. 74 1. 14 Table 2. Personality facets associated with dishonesty. Variable Extraversion Gregariousness Excitement Neuroticism Anxiety Anger Depression Immoderation Vulnerability Openness to Experience Imagination Liberalism Comparison t r -1. 93┼ -9. 12* -11. 40* -2. 34* -12. 64* -12. 75* -11. 80* -7. 85* -4. 06* -8. 07* -. 06 -. 09 -. 25* -. 10 -. 35* -. 12 -. 27* -. 15* . 16* -. 41* d -. 22 -. 96 -1. 31 -. 28 -1. 50 -1. 37 -1. 35 -. 84 -. 38 -. 96 • 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. 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 ro. Smantic relationships: An initial study on partner selection and mates' life satisfaction. Journal of adolescence, 35, 1537 -1546. [3] Mc. Crae, R. R. , & Costa, P. T. (1995). Trait explanations in personality psychology. European Journal of Personality, 9, 4, 231 -252. [4] Ashton, M. C. , & Lee, K. (2005). Honesty-Humility, the Big Five, and the Five-Factor Model. Journal Of Personality, 73(5), 1321 -1353. [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. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Special thanks to research assistants Mackenzie Case, Sara Couture, Drew Lindgren, Mc. Kenzie 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 kimhardy@boisestate. edu.