IPIP-HEXACO
Unconventionality
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 Unconventionality 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 Unconventionality Scale (O-Unco)
The IPIP-HEXACO Unconventionality scale (O:Unco) is a public-domain personality instrument from the International Personality Item Pool by Ashton, Lee, and Goldberg (2007). Unconventionality is the fourth facet of the Openness to Experience dimension and measures the degree to which individuals embrace eccentric, non-mainstream identities, rebel against authority, do things others find strange, and actively resist conventional social norms.
Items capture eccentric reputation, idea surprise, strange behavior, authority rebellion, and current-swimming, alongside desire to be seen as normal, mainstream, proper, and conventional. The alpha of .84 is strong. Research demonstrates that Unconventionality shows strong positive correlations with political liberalism, countercultural attitudes, and tolerance of ambiguity, while showing discriminant validity from intellectual curiosity and aesthetic sensitivity — unconventionality is specifically norm-challenging behavioral orientation, not intellectual or aesthetic openness.
Unconventionality vs. Openness to Experience (Big Five Inventory-2): Key Differences
| Feature | IPIP-HEXACO Unconventionality (O-Unco) | Openness to Experience (Big Five Inventory-2) |
|---|---|---|
| Core Construct | Non-conformity & eccentric identity | Broad experiential openness |
| Item Count | 10 items (IPIP-HEXACO) | 12 items (BFI-2 O domain) |
| Access | Public domain — free any use | Academic research use |
| Alpha Reliability | .84 (Ashton et al., 2007) | ~.81 (Soto & John, 2017) |
Facet Position Within the HEXACO Model
The Unconventionality facet (O-Unco) is one of four facets within the Openness to Experience (O) 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 = .84) 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 Unconventionality (O-Unco) scale specifically provides a standardized academic baseline for the unconventionality construct within the Openness to Experience 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 — Unconventionality Scale (O-Unco)
Is being unconventional actually a career advantage in most fields, or is it oversold?
Research on career outcomes and personality suggests the relationship is highly sector-dependent. In creative industries, technology startups, research environments, and entrepreneurship, high unconventionality consistently predicts both career entry and performance outcomes. In established institutional environments — finance, government, traditional corporate structures — the same trait can predict career friction, slower advancement, and conflict with organisational culture norms. The honest picture is that unconventionality has a narrower range of environments where it reliably produces career advantage than its cultural celebration suggests.
Why do people who pride themselves on being non-conformists often end up conforming to non-conformist groups?
This is one of social psychology's most reliably documented ironic findings. The drive to differentiate from the mainstream does not eliminate the fundamentally social human need for belonging — it redirects it toward alternative reference groups with their own social norms, aesthetics, and conformity pressures. Research on subculture membership consistently shows that countercultural communities enforce their own normative standards as rigidly as mainstream ones — often more so. True psychological unconventionality in research predicts comfort with social isolation that most self-identified non-conformists do not actually seek.
Is there a connection between unconventionality and political views?
The empirical association between high openness to experience (including unconventionality) and liberal or progressive political orientation is one of the most replicated findings in political psychology across cultures. The mechanism appears to involve tolerance of ambiguity, comfort with change, and openness to unfamiliar perspectives — cognitive orientations that align naturally with certain political values. This does not mean all unconventional individuals hold consistent political views, but the association is reliable and substantial enough to appear in meta-analyses across dozens of countries.
Can unconventional thinking be a liability in situations that require following established protocols?
Very much so, and research on high-stakes domains is instructive here. In contexts like aviation, surgery, and emergency response — where deviation from established protocols can be catastrophic — unconventional individuals sometimes show higher rates of procedural non-compliance, not from malice but from a habitual disposition to question and deviate from established norms. Training programmes in these domains explicitly address this by helping unconventional individuals recognise the specific contexts where protocol compliance is non-negotiable.
Does this unconventionality profile replace a formal psychological or organisational assessment?
No. The IPIP-HEXACO Unconventionality scoring engine is a self-reflection worksheet for educational and academic baseline purposes only. It does not assess creative capacity, professional fit, or individual psychological functioning, and produces no formal conclusions about individual personality in any applied context. Formal evaluation of personality, fit, or functioning for professional, educational, or research purposes requires a qualified professional and appropriate validated instruments.