Assessing the Shared Facets of Honesty-Humility and Machiavellianism

Abstract. The strength of the relation between honesty-humility and Machiavellianism has caused some authors to suggest that the two constructs share common facets. We test this notion in the current article using heterotrait-monotrait (HTMT) ratios. Our sample included 490 participants recruited from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) that completed a self-report survey. The facets of greed-avoidance and desire for status met HTMT ratio cut-offs expected in tests of convergent validity, and the facets of fairness and amorality closely approached these cut-offs. The honesty-humility facet of modesty also demonstrated very strong relations with many Machiavellianism facets, but none strong enough to indicate that the facets converge. These results indicate that honesty-humility and Machiavellianism share facets associated with a (dis)interest in social status and perhaps (dis)honesty. From these findings, we urge future authors to assess the incremental predictive validity of both honesty-humility and Machiavellianism beyond the other, placing a particular focus on outcomes with close associations to unshared facets. We also propose that these results provide insights into a shared conceptual core of honesty-humility and the Dark Triad. Specifically, (dis)interest in social status and (dis)honesty may be the conceptual link between honesty-humility and the Dark Triad, demanding future research on these facets.