Personality and Addiction: Assessing the HEXACO Personality Traits
A new systematic review and meta-analysis published in the journal, Addictive Behaviors, indicates that there is a statistically significant link between personality traits, behavioral addictions, and substance use disorders (SUDs).
The team of researchers from the University of Bergen in Norway included a total of 19 studies in their review, involving nearly 10,000 participants. The studies “investigated the association between HEXACO personality traits, SUDs, and behavioral addictions.”
The HEXACO Personality Traits
The HEXACO personality traits were discovered through linguistics in a search for personality characteristics common to all languages. The term first began to be used in the year 2000 to describe an expansion of the “big five” personality traits. The HEXACO traits are:
- Honesty-Humility
- Emotionality
- eXtraversion
- Agreeableness (versus Anger)
- Conscientiousness
- Openness to Experience
Each of these six “scales” contains 18 items for a total of 108 items in the original version of the personality assessment. The current version is recommended by Kibeom Lee, Ph.D., and Michael C. Ashton, Ph.D., developers of the assessment. It’s called HEXACO-PI-R, which stands for the HEXACO Personality Inventory, Revised, and contains 200 items.
I subjected myself to the HEXACO-PI-R at the organization’s website. The results are aggregated with others for research purposes. The questions do not appear in any particular order and may be randomly sorted. Most of the questions are easy to answer, but some are intriguingly complex, such as:
If I want something from a person I dislike, I will act very nicely toward that person in order to get it.
Many of the questions seem to revolve around one’s feelings in the presence of others, such as friends, family, and coworkers. Several questions deal with setting goals and staying the course. Many of the questions try to gauge your honesty by presenting situations that pit your personal interest against a moral response.
The scoring is provided in the six categories of HEXACO, with each category containing scores for four “features,” for a total of 24 feature scores, plus one additional feature score for altruism. The scores are based on “a large sample of Canadian university students (evenly weighted for men and women) who provided self-reports while participating in academic research studies.”
Taking the quiz requires about 10 minutes. At the conclusion, your scores are presented, along with a scale comparing your results with the average of the Canadians (it’s hard to outscore them in politeness). Drs. Lee and Ashton provide paragraph-long descriptions of all 25 features right on the test results page.
I scored very high on the Inquisitiveness scale, “a tendency to seek information about, and experience with, the natural and human world.” I scored very low on the Fearfulness scale, indicating “little fear of physical injury.” With few exceptions, most of my scores were close to the 50th percentile (of Canadian college students).
HEXACO Traits and Substance Abuse
Now let’s take a look at what our Norwegian researchers discovered about HEXACO traits, behavioral disorders, and substance use disorders. Their systematic review and meta-analysis found “statistically significant inverse associations” between behavioral addictions and:
- honesty-humility
- extraversion
- agreeableness
- conscientiousness
- openness to experience
Which means that if you score above the 50th percentile in these traits, your likelihood of developing “behavioral addictions” is above average. On the other hand, Emotionality showed a statistically significant positive association with behavioral addictions, meaning that those scoring above the 50th percentile in emotionality are less likely than average to develop behavioral addictions.
Behavioral addictions were determined through a variety of assessments used in the underlying studies. These included more than a dozen tests to determine:
For SUDs, the meta-analysis demonstrated statistically significant inverse associations with honesty-humility and conscientiousness. Other traits showed “non-significant associations.” SUDs were assessed using the following four scales:
- Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT)
- Cannabis Abuse Screening Test (CAST)
- Drug Abuse Screening Test (DAST-10)
- Normative Deviance Scale (NDS)
It’s rather surprising that high scores on Emotionality — which is comprised of Fearfulness, Anxiety, Dependence, and Sentimentality — are not statistically associated with substance abuse. Neither are high scores on Extraversion, according to this review. I would recommend proceeding with caution when it comes to using HEXACO to assess whether young persons will have a future tendency toward behavioral disorders or SUDs.
Written by Steve O’Keefe. First published July 21, 2025.
Sources:
“Associations between HEXACO personality traits, substance use disorders, and behavioral addictions: a systematic review and meta-analysis,” Addictive Behaviors, July 12, 2025.
“The Hexaco Personality Inventory – Revised,” by Kibeom Lee, Ph.D., & Michael C. Ashton, Ph.D., webpage copyright 2009.
Image Copyright: raspirator.
