IPIP-HEXACO
Modesty
A public-domain personality facet scoring engine
Instructions: For each statement, select the response that best describes how accurately it reflects your typical behavior and attitudes. There are no right or wrong answers. Respond as honestly as possible for the most informative academic baseline.
Scale: 1 = Very Inaccurate · 2 = Moderately Inaccurate · 3 = Neither · 4 = Moderately Accurate · 5 = Very Accurate
Your Modesty Profile
IPIP-HEXACO · Ashton, Lee & Goldberg (2007) · Public Domain
Facet Interpretation
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Academic Citation
Ashton, M. C., Lee, K., & Goldberg, L. R. (2007). The IPIP–HEXACO scales: An alternative, public-domain measure of the personality constructs in the HEXACO model. Personality and Individual Differences, 42, 1515–1526. doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2007.02.003
About the IPIP-HEXACO Modesty Scale (H-Mode)
The IPIP-HEXACO Modesty scale (H:Mode) is a public-domain personality instrument from the International Personality Item Pool by Ashton, Lee, and Goldberg (2007). Modesty is the fourth facet of Honesty-Humility, measuring the degree to which individuals view themselves as ordinary versus superior and the extent to which they seek recognition, power, and attention from others. Items directly assess self-superiority beliefs, attention-seeking, boasting behavior, and power desire.
Modesty emerged from cross-cultural lexical research as a stable component of the Honesty-Humility factor, showing robust negative correlations with narcissism measures across multiple cultures. The IPIP scale achieves a Cronbach's alpha of .81. Research by Ashton, Lee, and collaborators has demonstrated that Honesty-Humility — substantially anchored by the Modesty facet — captures meaningful variance in Dark Triad traits (narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy) that the Big Five model fails to represent as a unified dimension, providing incremental predictive validity for exploitation, entitlement, and social dominance behaviors.
Modesty vs. Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI-16): Key Differences
| Feature | IPIP-HEXACO Modesty (H-Mode) | Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI-16) |
|---|---|---|
| Core Construct | Egalitarian self-view vs. superiority | Narcissistic grandiosity |
| Item Count | 10 items (IPIP-HEXACO) | 16 items (NPI-16) |
| Access | Public domain — free any use | Public domain |
| Alpha Reliability | .81 (Ashton et al., 2007) | ~.72–.80 (NPI-16) |
Facet Position Within the HEXACO Model
The Modesty facet (H-Mode) is one of four facets within the Honesty-Humility (H) dimension of the six-factor HEXACO personality model developed by Michael Ashton and Kibeom Lee. Unlike the Big Five framework, HEXACO adds a sixth dimension — Honesty-Humility — capturing variance in sincere, fair, modest, and non-materialistic behavior that the five-factor model distributes across Agreeableness and Conscientiousness. The IPIP representation of this facet, developed in collaboration with Lewis Goldberg and the International Personality Item Pool project, provides researchers with an openly licensed operationalization that achieves internal consistency (alpha = .81) comparable to the proprietary HEXACO-PI-R while remaining entirely free for academic, organizational, and educational deployment.
Research and Applied Utility
Researchers and students in personality psychology, organizational behavior, and educational research regularly use the IPIP-HEXACO facet scales as targeted instruments for hypothesis testing, survey battery supplementation, and educational self-reflection activities. Because the IPIP scales are public domain, they may be embedded in any survey platform, online tool, or research system without licensing restrictions. The Modesty (H-Mode) scale specifically provides a standardized academic baseline for the modesty construct within the Honesty-Humility domain, enabling comparison with published normative data from the Ashton, Lee, and Goldberg (2007) validation study. The scale has been applied in cross-cultural research across more than 35 countries, providing researchers with substantial normative reference material.
Frequently Asked Questions — Modesty Scale (H-Mode)
Is a high modesty score actually useful in competitive career environments?
More than most people expect. Research on leadership effectiveness consistently shows that while low-modesty individuals may be more likely to self-nominate for visible roles, high-modesty leaders are rated more favourably by direct reports, produce lower turnover, and create stronger psychological safety in their teams. Modesty correlates with servant leadership orientations that consistently outperform authoritarian styles in multi-year organisational performance studies.
What is the actual difference between genuine humility and low self-esteem?
They feel similar from the outside but are psychologically distinct structures. Genuine modesty in the HEXACO sense is an egalitarian orientation — you do not see yourself as better than others, but you do not see yourself as worse either. Low self-esteem involves negative self-evaluation and fragile self-concept. Research shows these constructs are measurably separate: high-modesty individuals show stable, secure self-concepts, while low self-esteem is characterised by fragility and self-criticism.
Do social media platforms structurally reward low modesty?
Research on social media and narcissism finds exactly this. Platforms architecturally reward status-signalling, attention-seeking, and self-promotion — the low-modesty behavioural repertoire. Likes, follower counts, and public praise directly fuel the status-seeking and superiority-orientation associated with low modesty. Low-modesty individuals use status-signalling platforms more intensively and respond more strongly to social validation metrics, creating a reinforcement loop.
Can modesty be confused with people-pleasing?
They are frequently conflated but reflect entirely different mechanisms. Modesty is about self-perception — not viewing yourself as superior. People-pleasing is about behaviour — approval-seeking and conflict-avoidance driven by anxiety about social evaluation. A highly modest person can be entirely direct, confident, and unbothered by social approval. A people-pleaser can simultaneously hold grandiose self-views while performing deference for social safety. These traits are conceptually and empirically independent.
Does this modesty profile replace a formal self-esteem or narcissism evaluation?
No. The IPIP-HEXACO Modesty scoring engine is a self-reflection worksheet for educational awareness and academic baseline purposes only. It provides no formal conclusions about self-concept health, narcissism, or any psychological construct, and cannot substitute for professional evaluation. Formal evaluation of self-esteem or narcissism requires a qualified professional and appropriate validated instruments.