A sociocultural approach to honesty-humility

Honesty-Humility is a sixth major trait of personality (adding to the Five Factor Model) that describes the degree to which an individual is sincere, modest, honest, prosocial, and without a desire for elevated social status. Social status—our wealth, prestige, and societal respect—not only stratifies people into different social classes; it impacts our self-concept, behaviors, and perhaps even our personality tendencies. Prior research has found that high social status individuals tend to be less socially engaged with people outside of peer groups, lack empathic accuracy, express favorable attitudes towards greed, and are more likely to consider unethical behaviors, compared to lower status individuals. I predicted that priming high social class status (by comparison to lower status persons) would decrease self-reported honesty-humility, and increase social dominance orientation, narcissism, and Machiavellianism. MANOVA analyses indicated that priming high or low social status did not influence self-reports of those traits. However, multiple regression analyses found that self-perceived social status was positively related to narcissism and one facet of honesty-humility, inversely related to Machiavellianism and one facet of honesty-humility.