Agreeableness Personality Trait

Agreeableness is a personality trait which is associated with being honest, kind, polite, empathetic, cooperative and considerate. It is also one of the Big Five personality traits, alongside openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion and neuroticism. Curious how agreeable you are compared to the other four traits? You can take our free Big 5 personality test to find out.

Comprehensively, you can define agreeableness as:

Agreeableness is the tendency of someone to be pro-person, compassionate, trusting, forgiving, cooperative, considerate and soft-hearted.

A person who scores high on agreeableness would show compassion to others, trust people easily, forgive other people for their mistakes more often and are soft-hearted. If someone scores low on agreeableness they will be very antagonistic, cynical, manipulative, vengeful, and ruthless to others.

The Six Facets of Agreeableness

Just like the other traits of big five, agreeableness can be divided into six facets or sub-traits that explain in more detail what makes someone more agreeable than others.

The six facets that are associated with the domain of agreeableness are explained below:

1. Trust

This facet is associated with people who are well intentioned and honest. They are forgiving of others and easily trust other people. If someone scores low on this facet it predicts cynicism and skepticism in people, and these people also believe other people are dangerous and dishonest.

2. Straightforwardness

As the name suggests, these people are very direct and frank in their attitude. They are ingenuous and very candid in life. They do not manipulate others or try to be deceiving or hide their true emotions. The people who score low on this facet are usually very manipulative and they do it through deception, flattery and craftiness. They are very charming and clever and think that people who are very direct are naive.

It is important to have a distinction between concealing your emotions or being guarded when it comes to telling what really is in your mind and just straight-out lying. So a low score on this should not be confused with someone being a liar.

3. Altruism

Altruism can be defined as a tendency to be more helpful and more generous towards others. The people who score high in altruism show consideration and generosity towards others and show a willingness to help others with their problems. These people are mostly seen as kind hearted, soft and warm.

The people who score low on this facet are regarded as cold, selfish, cynical or snobbish. These people are more self centered and do not care a lot about getting involved in the problems of others.

4. Compliance

This facet predicts how someone would react to interpersonal conflicts. The people who score high on this are mild and meek. They do not show aggression towards others and easily forgive and forget others. They also defer to other people, are deferential and obliging.

People who score low on this are not cooperative and tend to be more competitive. They show no reluctance to show aggression when they think it is necessary. They are considered more demanding and headstrong than others.

5. Modesty

Modesty is characterized by being humble but not lacking in self esteem or self confidence. The people who score high are seen by other people as being unassuming and humble.

The people who score low are often considered arrogant or conceited by others. If there is a pathological lack of modesty in someone it is considered the clinical conception of narcissism.

6. Tender-Mindedness

This facet is associated with showing concern and sympathy for others. The people who score high on this facet show more concern towards people’s needs and they are more warm, friendly and soft-hearted with others.

Low scorers on this facet make decisions that are based on cold logic, they are mostly seen as opinionated, intolerant and cold by others.

Agreeableness and the Dark Triad

If you look back at the low end of every facet described above, a familiar picture starts to form: manipulative, cold, arrogant, ruthless. That picture has a name in personality research. The Dark Triad, a term introduced by Paulhus and Williams (2002), refers to three socially aversive but non-clinical traits that tend to travel together: narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy. Some researchers add sadism to make a Dark Tetrad.

The link to agreeableness is one of the more robust findings in this area. When researchers place the Dark Triad traits inside the Big Five, low agreeableness emerges as what they share. Paulhus and Williams (2002) reported that all three were negatively related to agreeableness, and subsequent work has repeatedly recovered the same result. Jakobwitz and Egan (2006) found agreeableness to be the Big Five factor common to all three, and Muris and colleagues (2017), in a large meta-analysis, again found agreeableness to be the strongest and most consistent Big Five correlate of the dark traits.

In other words, the Dark Triad is not made up of three unrelated conditions. What holds them together is a shared disregard for other people’s interests, and that is close to a definition of very low agreeableness.

Which facets do the work?

The domain-level correlation is useful, but the facets tell a more precise story. Each dark trait maps most closely onto a different part of agreeableness:

• Machiavellianism sits most obviously at the low end of Straightforwardness. Strategic manipulation, flattery and deception are the defining features of the construct, and they are exactly what a low Straightforwardness score describes.
• Narcissism is anchored at the low end of Modesty. As noted in that section, a pathological lack of modesty is close to the clinical conception of narcissism.
• Psychopathy is anchored at the low end of Tender-Mindedness and Altruism. Callousness and a lack of empathic concern are its defining features, and psychopathy is generally the Dark Triad trait most strongly and negatively associated with agreeableness overall.

This is a good illustration of why facet-level scoring matters. Three people can share an identical low agreeableness domain score and be low on it for three very different reasons.

An important caution

Low agreeableness is not the same thing as having a dark personality, and this is worth stating clearly because it is the most common misreading of this research.

Scoring low on agreeableness is common. Most people at the low end are simply blunt, competitive, skeptical or unsentimental. These are ordinary dispositions, and several of them are advantages: low agreeableness is associated with a willingness to negotiate hard, to deliver unwelcome feedback, and to hold a position under social pressure. It also carries a well-documented earnings advantage in some studies. The Dark Triad describes a narrow region at the extreme low end of the trait, not the whole lower half of the distribution.

It is also worth knowing that the Big Five may not be the best framework for this question. The HEXACO model, which adds a sixth factor called Honesty-Humility, captures the Dark Triad more cleanly than agreeableness does. Lee and Ashton (2005) found that Honesty-Humility accounted for the dark traits better than any Big Five factor. Notably, Honesty-Humility contains much of the content that the Big Five distributes across the Straightforwardness and Modesty facets described above, which is precisely where the dark traits load. If you are researching this area seriously, a HEXACO measure is likely to serve you better than a Big Five one.