Honesty-Humility is to Politeness as Agreeableness is to Agreeableness: A Reanalysis of Blötner (2025)

Addressing ongoing disagreements regarding the independence of HEXACO Honesty-Humility from the Big Five taxonomy, Blötner provides comprehensive evidence for the empirical distinction between Big Five Agreeableness and HEXACO Honesty-Humility. Yet, prior disagreements have mostly focused on potential redundancy between Honesty-Humility and the Politeness aspect of Agreeableness, rather than the broad Agreeableness domain. In a reanalysis of the data from Blötner, we found that Honesty-Humility and Politeness were strongly correlated, not clearly structurally distinguishable, and showed negligible divergences in their nomological networks. This same pattern of results was produced between three common measures of Big Five Agreeableness, suggesting Honesty-Humility and Politeness might also represent different operationalisations of the same trait.