Who tells prosocial lies? A HEXACO model investigation

We examined HEXACO personality correlates of prosocial lying behaviors. Specifically, we adopted an experimental procedure in which participants were asked to provide an essay writer with quantitative and qualitative feedback for the person’s rather poorly written essay (Lupoli et al., 2017). From this procedure, we assessed objective prosocial lying behaviors, feedback truthfulness, and feedback kindness. Honesty-Humility showed weak but positive associations with prosocial lying behaviors and feedback kindness. HEXACO Agreeableness also correlated positively with prosocial lying behaviors and feedback kindness, and negatively with feedback truthfulness. These results suggest that unconditional aversion to lying does not constitute a core component of the Honesty-Humility construct.