A SOCIOCULTURAL APPROACH TO HONESTY-HUMILITY ____________ A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of California State University, Chico ____________ In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in Psychology Psychological Science Option ____________ by Waleed Jami Spring 2017 A SOCIOCULTURAL APPROACH TO HONESTY-HUMILITY A Thesis by Waleed Jami Spring 2017 APPROVED BY THE INTERIM DEAN OF GRADUATE STUDIES: _________________________________ Sharon Barrios, Ph.D. APPROVED BY THE GRADUATE ADVISORY COMMITTEE: _________________________________ _________________________________ David Hibbard, Ph.D. Lawrence Herringer, Ph.D., Chair Graduate Coordinator _________________________________ David Hibbard, Ph.D. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank Dr. Lawrence Herringer for his mentorship. I really appreciate the support. I hope to have an advisor as supportive as you in the future. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE Acknowledgments ...................................................................................................... iii List of Tables.............................................................................................................. v Abstract....................................................................................................................... vi CHAPTER I. Introduction.............................................................................................. 1 II. Literature Review..................................................................................... 11 Honesty-Humility and Related Variables..................................... 11 Social and Environmental Influencers of Personality .................. 16 Social Status ................................................................................. 19 Hypotheses and Research Questions............................................ 22 III. Methodology............................................................................................. 23 Materials....................................................................................... 23 Procedure...................................................................................... 25 IV. Results...................................................................................................... 26 V. Discussion................................................................................................. 30 General Discussion....................................................................... 30 Limitations.................................................................................... 34 Future Research............................................................................ 35 References .................................................................................................................. 36 iv LIST OF TABLES TABLE PAGE 1. Descriptive Statistics for the Self-Perceived Status, Honesty-Humility Narcissism, SDO, and Machiavellianism............. 26 2. Bivariate Correlations of Self-Perceived Status, Honesty-Humility and Its Facets, Narcissism, SDO, and Machiavellianism ............................................................................... 27 v ABSTRACT A SOCIOCULTURAL APPROACH TO HONESTY-HUMILITY by Waleed Jami Master of Arts in Psychology Psychological Science Option California State University, Chico Spring 2017 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. vi 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. vii CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION Everyone in the world has their own level of concern for others, their own degree of consideration and integrity in dealing with other people. Alfred Adler (1931) referred to this almost a century ago as “social interest” or “community feeling,” and considered it an essential characteristic of both individual mental health and collectively successful societies. Some individuals have high integrity and prosociality, and others tend to be somewhat antisocial. Recently, Michael Ashton and Kibeom Lee (2007) highlighted the importance of this individual difference in the personality trait of “honesty-humility,” the typical degree of integrity, prosociality and honesty of a person. Extensive research in personality identified many constructs that are indicative of “social interest.” In modern personality theory, two particular variables stand out as reliable predictors of prosocial behavior: honesty-humility, and agreeableness. In the late 1980s, theories of personality organized characteristics in a taxonomy of personality “traits.” The first widely accepted, contemporary classification of personality traits was developed by Costa and McCrae (1989). Their efforts resulted in a personality model that comprised five personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. This five factor model defines agreeableness as a construct that explains individual differences in kindness, sympathy, compliance, and tolerance. In the five factor model, agreeableness is the trait that best 1 2 resembles the notion of prosociality. However, in recent years, several studies across different cultures around the world replicated the same five traits, but also suggested the emergence of a sixth trait: honesty-humility (Lee & Ashton, 2004). Honesty-humility is defined as a person’s propensities towards fairness, sincerity, modesty, and a rejection of manipulative exploitation of others and lavish lifestyles. In the six factor model, agreeableness is defined as the degree a person is flexible, forgiving, and supportive. However, honesty-humility and agreeableness are both traits that are involved in the expression of social interest. Although these two traits are indicative of prosociality, they are independent of each other and represent different patterns of behavior. Theoretically, a person can have elevated levels of honesty-humility, yet also have low levels of agreeableness and vice-versa. In other instances, some people tend to demonstrate high levels of both honesty-humility and agreeableness, and others may portray low levels of both traits. For example, a person with high levels of agreeableness and low levels of honesty-humility could be highly cooperative and amicable, but also have insincere intentions and a conceitful attitude. In contrast, an individual with low levels of agreeableness, but high levels of honesty-humility could be uncooperative and inflexible, yet also be modest and sincere. Both traits have prosocial implications, but in different ways (Hilbig, Zettler, Leist, & Heydasch, 2013). In an experimental economic study, Hilbig et al. (2013) established contextual differences between honesty-humility and agreeableness. The prosocial differences were seen in two experimental economic games known as the dictator and ultimatum games. Participants assigned the role of dictator can split an 3 endowment (e.g., a few dollars or tokens) anyway they want without any input from the other player. The other player’s only choice is to take whatever is offered to them. However, in the ultimatum game, the responder can agree or disagree with the partitioned endowment, and if they disagree, neither of the players reap the endowment. In these games, honesty-humility is predictive of non-exploitative cooperation and fairness in endowment allocation as the dictator in the dictator game, but not significant in the behavior of the responder in the ultimatum game (Hilbig et al, 2013). On the other hand, agreeableness has a proclivity towards receptive partnership; higher agreeableness predicted higher acceptance rate of the endowment in the ultimatum, but did not relate to non-exploitative cooperation or fairness in the dictator game. At the opposite end of the social interest spectrum, there are personality traits that represent consistent maladaptive patterns of thought and behavior; they are known as the Dark Triad or dark personalities (Paulhus, 2014; Paulhus & Williams, 2002). The dark triad consists of narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. Just as honesty- humility and agreeableness complement each in different aspects of social interest, the Dark Triad are three traits that are moderately related to one another, and complement each other in different features of mischief, selfishness, and even malicious behaviors. Psychopathy is a trait that describes a pattern of callousness, exploitation of others, and violent