Gone too far—or not far enough? Comments on the article by Ashton and Lee (2001)

Ashton and Lee argue that Honesty should be added to the Big Five model of personality as a sixth factor, and present a theoretical framework for interpreting Big Five factors and Honesty that helps make sense of the proposed six‐factor structure. The attempt by Ashton and Lee to go beyond the Big Five is applauded, but numerous problems are evident. Adding Honesty to the Big Five is plausible only if one ignores key assumptions that the Big Five model consists of independent factors that are candidates for pervasive lexical universals. The proposal does not take into account significant deviations from the Anglo‐Germanic Big Five that have occurred in emic studies of languages having their origin outside of northern Europe, nor potential substantive interpretations of the widely replicated Negative Valence factor. Future studies should seek improvements or alternatives to the Big Five in a way that keeps constituent factors well discriminated from one another and enhances the likelihood of ubiquity across diverse languages and cultures. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.