How Well Do Big Five Measures Capture HEXACO Scale Variance?

We examined the ability of several Big Five measures to account for variance in HEXACO Personality Inventory?Revised (HEXACO?PI?R) scales and vice versa. Some Big Five measures accounted for more variance in HEXACO Honesty-Humility than did others, but these differences were largely offset by opposing differences in accounting for variance in HEXACO Agreeableness and Emotionality. As a consequence, the various Big Five measures showed similarly large overall deficiencies in accounting for HEXACO scale variance, relative to variance accounted for in Big Five scales by HEXACO?PI?R scales. The results imply that the use of Big Five instead of HEXACO scales entails a large loss of information, about equal to the amount that would be lost by discarding one of the Big Five scales.