Book Review: The H Factor of Personality

Book Author: Kibeom Lee, Michael Ashton

I thought I’d introduce a binary “keeper” rating. To indicate books that are worth reading, and potentially revisiting down the road.

I’d call this book a keeper.

This was an interesting book about personality traits. Data scientists did a cluster analysis and identified that cultures across the globe converge on six personality traits (the big five was actually wrong).

These traits are:

• humility/honesty (the H factor)
• emotionality
• extraversion
• agreeableness
• concientiousness
• openness

What’s interesting to me is that people think in these terms, in these dimensions. It’s not clear to me that this is a good way to cluster people but it’s how human’s do it by default. It’s good to know what dimensions you and others are labelled upon.

The people we all want to be with are those with high H – honesty and humility. They are the paragons of society.

The book goins on to describe how you can handle and deal with low H people and the different combinations/archetypes of people with low H and other traits.

They do some interesting linkages between emotional traits and other beliefs such as political beliefs and religious beliefs.

Emotional people tend to believe in the supernatural and since women tend to be more emotional they tend to be more likely to believe in the supernatural. Maybe that explains horoscopes hehe. I scored high or very high across the board in the self-assessment for everything but emotionality myself, perhaps that’s why I don’t believe in the supernatural.

There were other interesting correlations. Fun book.