The behaviour of low-H people is expressed in many aspects of life. Here we’ll consider three domains in which people who are very low in H really distinguish themselves: money, power, and sex.
Most people who are low in H will usually try to get money through perfectly legal means, by working and investing. This simply reflects the reality that crime usually doesn’t pay. Most low-H people realize that it’s hard to get away with theft or fraud for a long time, and they decide that it’s better to look for more reliable ways of getting rich. But in principle, they quite like the idea of getting something for nothing, and it doesn’t bother them if that particular something comes at someone else’s expense. So the people who are most ready to steal and to swindle when the opportunity arises—and the people who do in fact commit most of the acquisitive crimes—are people low in H.
In some of our own research studies, we’ve asked students to report—confidentially and anonymously—the dollar value of the money and merchandise they’ve stolen. What we always find is that the people who have stolen the most—whether by shoplifting, by break and enter, by pilfering on the job, or otherwise—are much below average in H. Generally, most of the total amount stolen is accounted for by less than 10% of the students, and on average those students are lower in H than about 80% to 90% of students overall.1
Now, you might think it’s not really so impressive that the people who say they’re low in H are the same people who say they’ve stolen a lot. Couldn’t it all just be a matter of who is willing to admit, or even exaggerate, their own dishonesty? But actually, it isn’t. Even when we measure the students’ personalities using observer reports—provided by the student’s roommate, or best friend, or boyfriend/girlfriend—low levels of H are still related to self-reports of theft. And those self-reports of theft are related to all the various aspects of low H, including the aspects that don’t have any obvious, transparent link with theft: the college students who’ve stolen the most are mainly the same ones who think they’re better than others and who like to manipulate people. (For some research that isn’t based on participants’ admissions of past wrong-doings, see Box 9–1 for a study that relied on direct observations of dishonest behaviour.)
Low H has a fairly strong link with theft (and with crime and delinquency more generally), but that link is far from perfect, for several reasons. On the one hand, some people who are low in H have few opportunities to steal, and some feel rich enough that they have little motivation to do so. And many low-H people have other personality traits that make them cautious about stealing. As we mentioned in Chapter 4, low-H persons who are also low in C and low in E are strong candidates for criminal activity, whereas low-H persons who are high in C and high in E express their dishonesty a lot more prudently.
BOX 9–1 Cheating in the Psychology Lab
In a recent study, Hal Hershfield, Taya Cohen, and Leigh Thompson examined whether people’s levels of the H factor—as measured by self-reports on the HEXACO-PI-R—predicted which of them would cheat in a laboratory task. The researchers asked their student research participants to solve a series of eight anagram problems (e.g., unscrambling EFLWOR to form FLOWER). Each participant was promised 50 cents for each anagram that he or she solved. The rules, however, stated that the anagrams must be solved in sequence—in other words, the participant had to solve the first anagram before moving on to the second, then solve the second before going to the third, and so on. The trick was that the second and seventh anagrams were virtually unsolvable, because these were extremely rare words (i.e., MENALD, CAPRIC) that are unknown to almost all students.
After 15 minutes, each participant was asked to count the anagram problems that he or she had solved and to take the corresponding amount of cash from an envelope, in an honour system of payment. Participants who wanted to cheat could feel free to do so, because participation was anonymous and there was no verification of the number of solved problems. But because the second and seventh anagrams were essentially unsolvable, participants who took payment for solving two to six problems must have cheated once, and participants who took payment for solving seven or eight problems must have cheated twice.
The researchers found that low-H participants were more likely to have cheated in taking payment for solving the anagrams. The correlation between the H factor and cheating—about –.35—is actually surprisingly large, given that many other variables could influence cheating behaviour in this particular situation (an extremely low-stakes situation, we might add) and on this particular occasion.2
At the same time, some high-H people occasionally commit dishonest acts. Sometimes a situation is tempting enough that only people very high in H resist the urge to act selfishly. And in some situations, dishonest actions are motivated less by low H than by other characteristics. A young person who wouldn’t think of stealing (or cheating, etc.) on his or her own might succumb to peer pressure. Or a young person who has no intrinsic motivation to commit such a crime might do so purely as an act of rebellion against parents or authority figures. Because of these varying circumstances, we can’t always be sure that a particular dishonest act was driven by a low level of H in the person who committed that act. To take just one example, many high-H people would steal out of desperation if they or their kin were hungry or cold or sick. This situation confronts very few, if any, of the students in our samples, but it’s worth remembering that although a given behaviour can be strongly influenced by a personality trait in one situation, the same behaviour may be almost irrelevant to that personality trait in another situation.
Some ways of studying personality and behaviour allow us to control for situational influences and thereby see the full strength of the link between low H and various dishonest actions. Probably the best such approach is to ask people to respond to hypothetical scenarios that depict some opportunity to act dishonestly for personal gain. By describing the features of these scenarios in just the right way, we can find out how people would act in a prototypical default situation—in the absence of any risk of getting caught, of any truly desperate straits, or of any pressures to conform or to rebel. This approach also allows us to find out how personality would relate to dishonest behaviours of a kind that few people have the opportunity to commit.
One such kind of dishonesty is corporate crime, whereby officials commit crimes that profit their company. This form of dishonest behaviour is interesting for the ways in which it differs from more common crimes. Unlike common theft or robbery, corporate crime is usually committed by people who have high levels of income, education, and occupational status. And unlike common theft or robbery, it often involves massive amounts of money taken from many people.
Few people ever find themselves in a position to commit large-scale corporate crimes. But how many people would do so, given the chance? And how much is personality—particularly a low-H personality—implicated in the willingness to commit those crimes? We’ve studied this by asking several hundred university students to respond to a series of scenarios in which they take the role of a corporate executive. Each scenario describes an opportunity to maximize the company’s profit—and the respondent’s income—in a highly unethical way that involves corrupt business practices, risks to public health and safety, or damage to the environment. Here’s just one example:
Suppose that you are in charge of sales for a large corporation that exports telecommunications equipment to countries around the world. Recently, you have been trying to obtain the contract for supplying a new telecom system to Impoveria, a developing nation that has only recently begun to modernize.
In negotiations with the president of Impoveria and his cabinet, you have learned that your company’s bid is not the lowest; instead, two of your competitor companies have lower bids. However, the president and his cabinet members have told you that you can still have the contract, if you agree to send back 5% of the money received from the Impoverian government to their own personal bank accounts in Switzerland. It is clear to you that, even with this 5% kickback, your company will still make a substantial profit on this contract, and that you will be seen as the person who made it happen.
Would you recommend that your company agree to the conditions and sign the contract?
(1) Definitely Not
(2) Probably Not
(3) Probably Yes
(4) Definitely Yes
So, how many of our students would put profit ahead of morality? About 15% responded “probably yes” or “definitely yes” to most of the scenarios. Conversely, about 15% responded “definitely not” to most scenarios. (The other 70% mainly responded “probably not”; this means that they leaned toward the ethical option, but not as strongly as you might want our future corporate leaders to do.)
And what about the personalities of the students? We measured their levels of the HEXACO factors by self-report and also by observer report from their friends or roommates or romantic partners. Of the students who were most willing to profit at the expense of the public good, about three-quarters were below average in H; by contrast, of the students who were least willing, about three-quarters were above average in H.3
Perhaps these results overestimate the number of students who would make the unethical business decisions. After all, the situations were hypothetical, without any real risks of public harm or of criminal prosecution. But then again, the situations also lacked real money, so perhaps in a real-life situation even more of the students would put money over morality.
Unethical corporate activity is one way that low-H people express their personalities in today’s market economy. But to some extent, the market economy actually constrains the selfishness of low-H people, because most of them can satisfy their greed only by producing things that others want. When law enforcement is good enough that crime generally doesn’t pay, and when people can freely exchange labour and property, the only reliable way to get rich is to provide a good or a service that others will buy. As Adam Smith put it, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest.”4 The beauty of Smith’s free market, at least in principle, is that the would-be thief and the would-be overlord must work for a living, perhaps in the food processing industry.
Yet low-H people find ways to defeat the spirit, and even the letter, of the rules that govern a market economy. The essence of the low-H personality is a willingness to gain by exploiting others, and therefore such people will always be ready to cheat in their economic transactions, with greater or lesser degrees of subtlety.
Anyone who sells on the principle “Let the buyer beware” is following the low-H strategy of doing business. Think of the stereotype of the used-car salesman or the shady building contractor. Similarly, anyone who tricks people into making ill-advised deals is using a classic low-H tactic. One excellent example is predatory lending, where the lender’s aim is to foreclose on the assets of a borrower who probably will be unable to repay a loan. (So too is borrowing under false pretences, for example, by exaggerating income on a loan application or by planning simply to walk away if unable to repay the loan.) Yet another tactic of low-H persons involves shifting costs onto third parties so that the public must pay the “externalities” associated with their business. Classic cases here are the business owner who dumps toxic waste or who sells addictive drugs or deadly weapons.
Tax evasion is another means by which low-H people undermine the market economy. Tax rates differ from one jurisdiction to the next, but every society must raise some taxes to pay for the public goods that its people deem important. Low-H people are disproportionately those who evade their taxes or avoid them in ways that are legal but contrary to the spirit of the laws. For example, income tax laws in many countries generally allow a variety of exemptions and deductions. Some of these are obvious and are claimed by virtually everyone, but others are obscure loopholes that are discovered only by people who actively search for them. This means that the burden of paying taxes is shifted from people who try to avoid paying them onto people who don’t. This essentially means that high-H persons—those whose sense of social responsibility outweighs their greed—end up subsidizing low-H persons. (There are some high-H people who openly refuse to pay taxes on the grounds that the money would be used for immoral purposes, such as subsidizing aggressive wars. But we doubt that many of the tax-dodging crowd are taking their inspiration from Thoreau or Gandhi.) And the free riding of low-H persons isn’t limited to tax evasion: it is people who are low in H who would claim benefits they don’t really deserve, as in cases of welfare fraud or disability insurance fraud.
BOX 9–2 The H Factor and the Free Rider Problem
A recent study from Germany neatly illustrates the problem of free riding in low-H persons. Researchers Benjamin Hilbig, Ingo Zettler, and Timo Heydasch examined people’s behaviour in a “public goods game.”5 In this game, each person is given an initial endowment of points, and each person can contribute any number of his or her points to a common pool. All points contributed to the common pool are multiplied and then distributed equally among all of the persons—regardless of each person’s contribution.
Notice that the best outcome for the group collectively is for everyone to contribute heavily to the common pool. However, for any given person there is the temptation to be a free rider—to keep one’s points and then benefit from everyone else’s contributions. In this way, this public goods game captures the essence of many real-life situations, such as paying one’s taxes, refraining from littering, paying the fare on public transit, and refraining from watering one’s lawn during a drought.
Hilbig, Zettler, and Heydasch found that people who were very low in H contributed a little more than 30% of their points on average, whereas people who were very high in H contributed almost 70% of their points on average. Using these results, the researchers calculated what would happen in a group consisting (a) only of persons above average in H, and (b) only of persons below average in H. In a group of five high-H people, the total gain for the whole group would be about 25% higher than in a group of five low-H people.
It’s easy to see that a community of high-H people would function much more effectively than would a community of low-H people. For some speculation about how an entire society of high-H persons might look, see Box 9–3.
Even when low-H people conform perfectly to the ideals of the market economy, they can still do a lot of harm. Consider conspicuous consumption, which is one of the hallmarks of the low-H personality. At first regard, this might not seem to be a major social problem: If low-H people want to waste their money on expensive, flashy toys, well, who cares? But conspicuous consumption by some has harmful consequences for all.
The economist Robert H. Frank has explained the problem as follows.6 First, people try to outspend others on certain kinds of goods, simply so that they can have better—and be seen to have better—than other people do. For example, people like to have the nicest car or house or clothes or jewellery or furniture or restaurant reservations. In contrast, they don’t compete in this way when spending money on, say, their insurance policies. This produces an expenditure arms race, in which people spend more and more money on these so-called positional goods. To get that money, people may take on large debts and may sacrifice much of their leisure time; they may also demand reductions in taxes—taxes that could be spent on public goods such as roads or schools or hospitals. But this escalation of spending doesn’t make people any happier, because each person’s relative standing in the competition of consumption remains more or less the same: on average, we never actually overtake the Joneses.
Now, if high-H people could just exempt themselves from this competition altogether, they could avoid many of its negative effects. But they can’t. When low-H people create a speculative bubble (such as the real estate bubbles of the 2000s), the result is an economic crisis that causes unemployment for low-H and high-H people alike. And the arms race for luxury goods will cause most high-H people to spend more money even though they don’t care about showing off. For example, when low-H people buy ever larger cars in an effort to show off, high-H people who would prefer to buy smaller cars feel at higher risk of being killed in a car accident and may feel compelled to upsize. Or when low-H people spend extravagantly on, say, business suits, high-H people who would rather just buy a basic suit may find themselves being taken less seriously at job interviews, making them feel compelled to follow the mantra of “dress for success.”
When Lord Acton said that power corrupts, he missed half the story: power also attracts the corrupt. Low-H people crave power, and they express this in a variety of attitudes. Consider the simple statement, “I would like to have more power than other people,” which Lew Goldberg included in a questionnaire that he gave to his sample of Oregon adults. Among people who strongly disagreed with that statement, the large majority (over 80%) were above average in the H factor; among people who agreed or strongly agreed, most (again over 80%) were below average in the H factor.
Other links between low H and the need for power over others emerged from this sample of Oregon adults. Goldberg administered the Campbell Interest and Skill Survey, which assesses people’s interests in various occupations and indicates how closely their responses match those of workers in those occupations. For example, if the pattern of your responses on the survey is similar to that of accountants, then you will score highly on the “Accountants” scale. There are 59 such occupations in this survey, and of those 59, the “CEO/President” scale was the one that showed the strongest link with low levels of the H factor (a correlation of about –.35). This meant that even though many CEOs and presidents are highly ethical people, the average CEO or president apparently has interests similar to those of low-H people.
Probably the central problem of human society is that the people who most want power—people low in H—are also the people most likely to abuse it. Democracy and limited government can go a long way toward solving this problem. In a democracy, you can gain power only by making some credible promises to give voters things they want, and you can keep power only by persuading voters that you have delivered on those promises. And in any system of limited government, you can have only so much power, because other branches and levels of government will act as checks against you.
But even in countries that enjoy democratic and limited government, low-H people can gain power by deceit and then abuse that power. When seeking power, skilled politicians will successfully mislead voters, and deception in politics is less strictly regulated than is deception in the marketplace. For example, advertising by political candidates generally isn’t subject to the laws that govern commercial advertising, and promises by political candidates generally aren’t treated as formal contracts. In fact, a total avoidance of deception can be fatal to success in politics: a politician who tells people what they don’t want to hear will probably not last long.
Once ensconced in office, politicians—and the public servants who carry out their policies—can use their power to personal advantage, as far as they can get away with doing so. Even the least corrupt countries have occasional scandals when politicians and other government officials are caught taking bribes or kickbacks or awarding contracts to their cronies. Another variant is the misuse of public funds, as when politicians or bureaucrats claim extravagant amounts for expenses that are personal rather than professional. (Of course, this also happens in the private sector, and sometimes too in not-for-profit organizations.)
But the abuse of power by political leaders and government officials is hardly limited to personal corruption. The most spectacular—and terrifying—abuses are those involving aggressive war and other forms of mass murder. When low-H persons attain positions of essentially unchecked power, and when those persons are motivated by some ideology, the consequences are often horrific. In the most extreme cases—think of Hitler or Stalin—the toll may be counted in the tens of millions of innocent lives.
Let’s turn now to power on a much pettier scale. In modern societies, economic power is diffused throughout the private sector rather than concentrated solely in government. In corporations spanning the range of economic activity, many low-H workers jockey for position, hoping to ascend the corporate ladder by whatever means will succeed. Just as a politician will tell voters what they want to hear, many employees will be yes-men and yes-women, cynically currying favour with their supervisors and other bosses in the hope of rising through the corporate ranks. But the tactics used by low-H employees to get ahead at work are not limited to yea-saying and flattery (recall our discussion of workplace impression management in Chapter 5). They also practise a much wider array of Machiavellian tactics. Some of them claim credit for achievements that were really due—at least in large part—to the effort and talent of others. And some go even further, seeking to damage the reputations of co-workers by criticizing their work unjustly or by spreading unflattering rumours about them, whether true or not. And a few will go so far as to threaten and intimidate their current or prospective rivals.
All of these examples of Machiavellian tactics in the workplace have their counterparts in schools, from the primary grades right up to university classes. In some cases the goal is to gain favour with teachers, but the main preoccupation for most students is their status with their peers. And here the young low-H person may find much opportunity for bullying others,7 whether by overt physical intimidation (of the kind typically favoured by boys) or by more subtle arts of social exclusion (which are perhaps practised more skilfully by girls than by boys, who nonetheless get a lot of practice). For very low-H people, social relationships are a zero sum game in which all tactics are justified in the battle to attain status.
Sex is a domain in which people give each other much pleasure, but it’s also one in which people exploit each other quite ruthlessly. Modern countries generally have laws that limit the worst of the sexual exploitation that some low-H people would be tempted to commit, such as sexual assaults or sexual abuse of children. But low H is also involved in other, subcriminal forms of exploitation in sexual relationships.
Consider the cad philosophy of “love them and leave them” (or its less euphemistic equivalent involving words that start with “f”). In this familiar story, one person, almost always a man, uses false affection or false promises to obtain sexual favours from another person, almost always a woman. He pretends to love her simply so that she will let him have sex with her. This is classic low-H behaviour, and at least under some conditions, it would serve to propagate low-H tendencies into the next generation: the successful Don Juan might end up as the biological father of many children by many mothers, without actually raising those children or providing for them in any way.
A different kind of exploitation by low-H men is that of polygyny, whereby some men have more than one wife and other men remain unmarried. Note that even though the status of women in polygynous societies is generally rather low, not all women are opposed to polygyny. To paraphrase George Bernard Shaw, a woman might prefer a one-tenth share of a first-rate man to a full share of a third-rate man, if we assume that the men who acquire multiple wives are “first-rate” by definition. However, polygyny is grossly exploitive of the men in polygynous societies who—for whatever reason—are unable to marry. In a polygynous society, many men have little prospect of having a wife and children and thus of having any family life. This isn’t to say that the men who do attain multiple wives must be low in H, but it’s a fair bet that low-H men are those who are most supportive of such a system. (Recall from Chapter 7 that people who favour social hierarchies tend to be low in H.)
Another form of exploitation is that of cheating on a romantic partner with whom one is supposed to have a monogamous relationship. People low in H—men or women—will not be much deterred from infidelity by an ethical reluctance to betray the trust of their spouse. If the opportunity comes along to have an affair with someone sexier—either more physically attractive or of higher status—the low-H person will likely take it. This isn’t to say that the correspondence between low H and infidelity is perfect: some low-H people will simply not be much interested in extramarital affairs, or will be too wary of the reaction of a vigilant and suspicious spouse; and a few high-H people will have affairs if their spouse is sufficiently unkind or if their marriage is sufficiently unhappy. But for very low-H people, the default setting is a willingness to cheat on their spouse.
Sexual histories tend to differ between low-H people and high-H people, especially among men. Low-H people pursue more short-term relationships, make more attempts to poach other people’s partners, and have more sex partners than do high-H people. In one of our studies, we asked university students to indicate how many different sex partners they realistically fore-saw themselves having during the next five years. About 10% of male students indicated nine or more partners, and about three-quarters of those students scored below the average of the H factor.8 None of the other personality factors was a better predictor than H of the expected number of sex partners. This doesn’t mean that the low-H men would necessarily end up with more sex partners, although we expect that to some extent they would. But the fact that they expect—and presumably want to have—more partners is itself interesting.
As we mentioned above, it’s mostly men—low-H men—who adopt the classic cad pattern of using insincere affection as a means to gaining sexual gratification. Perhaps the female equivalent of the cad is the tease: a woman who holds out the false prospect of a sexual relationship with a man in order to obtain from him favours of various kinds—gifts of money or jewellery, help with work at school or the office, and so on. For women low in H, sex and affection are tools for manipulating men into giving them what they want. Another incarnation of the low-H woman is the gold digger, who seeks to marry simply with a view to obtaining the wealth and status of her prospective husband, either with or without the plan to divorce him later. For women low in H (and especially those who are also low in E), the idea of marrying for love seems ridiculously naive, and the idea of marrying for money is simply common sense.
Low H also plays an important role in sexual harassment of the quid pro quo variety. In the typical sexual quid pro quo, a person in a position of authority, usually a man, obtains sexual favours from a person having less power, usually a woman, in exchange for some reward, such as a raise or a promotion. Sometimes the “reward” is simply the avoidance of some penalty, such as being fired.
In one of our research projects, we compared the personalities of people who would engage in quid pro quo sexual harassment with those of people who wouldn’t.9 In studying this question, we wanted to examine both “sides” of the quid pro quo equation: What are the personality traits of people who would offer rewards in exchange for sexual favours? And what are the personality traits of people who would grant—or even offer—sexual favours in exchange for rewards?
To find out, we asked our research participants—men and women university students—to consider two pairs of related scenarios. Here’s one of the two pairs:
Suppose that you are a high-level government official. You are currently making decisions about the awarding of a major government contract, and there are several companies that are competing for this contract. You are very strongly attracted to the representative of one of these companies, and this person seems to be very strongly motivated to get the contract (which would mean a large commission for that representative). In fact, you are sure that this person would perform sexual favours in exchange for a major government contract, and you are also sure that you would not be caught or punished in any way for making this arrangement.
Would you give this representative the contract in exchange for sexual favours?
(1) Definitely No
(2) Probably Not
(3) Probably Yes
(4) Definitely Yes
Now imagine a situation similar to the one above, but suppose instead that you are a company representative instead of a government official. Assume that you could definitely receive the contract and commission in exchange for sexual favours, and that no one would find out about this exchange.
Would you be willing to provide sexual favours in exchange for the contract?
(1) Definitely Not
(2) Probably Not
(3) Probably Yes
(4) Definitely Yes
As you can see, the first scenario assesses the willingness to trade rewards for sexual favours, and the second assesses the converse. Notice that there is no suggestion of any desperate circumstances facing the company representative: what we wanted to measure was the willingness to trade sexual favours for some substantial reward even when one’s basic needs are securely being met. (We realized that a person who normally would never seek advantage through sexual favours might submit to a sexual quid pro quo if there seemed to be no other choice: consider, for example, a single mother faced with the prospect of losing her job.)
How many of our participants indicated a willingness to make these sexual quid pro quos? Only a minority, but a fairly substantial minority. For each scenario in the pair given above, about three-quarters of women and about one-half of men responded “definitely not”; fewer than 10% of women and about 20% of men responded “probably yes” or “definitely yes.” Men were thus more receptive to the idea of sexual quid pro quos than women were.
This result wasn’t surprising, but an unexpected finding was that the two scenarios hardly differed in their pattern of responses. We had expected men to be relatively more willing to trade material rewards for sexual favours, and we had expected women to be relatively more willing to trade sexual favours for material rewards. However, there was little evidence of this except that women were slightly more willing to give a yes response to the second scenario than to the first.
What were the differences in personality between the people who were willing to make sexual quid pro quos, and those who weren’t? The biggest difference was in the H factor: of the people who definitely wouldn’t do any of the sexual quid pro quos, only about one-third were below the average level of H. But of the people who probably would do the sexual quid pro quos, more than three-quarters were below that average level. None of the other HEXACO factors showed any differences nearly as large as this one. Of the six personality dimensions, it’s H that best predicts the likelihood of seeking a sexual quid pro quo.
Imagine a society in which many people are very high in H and hardly any people are low. What would such a society look like? We can speculate on this question by extrapolating from the characteristics of higher- and lower-H people and from their responses to questions about their attitudes on political issues.
First, it would be free and democratic. People who are high in H aren’t power hungry, and they wouldn’t want megalomaniacs for leaders. In a high-H society, civil liberties would be strong and the powers of government would be dispersed widely across its various levels (i.e., federal, state/provincial, local) and branches (i.e., executive, legislative, judicial). Corruption among politicians and civil servants would be extremely rare.
Second, it would be egalitarian. High-H individuals avoid materialism and conspicuous consumption and dislike social hierarchies. Accordingly, a high-H society would have a rather small gap between the “rich” and the “poor.” For example, the salaries of CEOs would be only several times those of the average workers in their companies—not several dozen or several hundred times higher. Also, with very little “free riding” in a high-H society, taxpayers would willingly support an extensive system of universal social welfare programs, such as direct government payments to poor households and unemployed persons, as well as publicly funded health care, education, and old-age pensions. These programs would be funded through rather high taxes levied chiefly on excess consumption rather than on income or on capital.10
Third, it would be ethically strict. High-H people have high standards as to what constitutes ethical behaviour, and this would be reflected in the laws of a high-H society. Such a society would set a low threshold for regulating or criminalizing any activities that exploit individuals or impose negative externalities on the broader society. For example, it would have strict controls on pollution, addictive drugs, gambling, weapons, dangerous products (both physical and financial), and animal exploitation. In a high-H society, concerns about exploitation and negative externalities would often outweigh concerns about nanny-state regulation. Attitudes toward sexual behaviour wouldn’t necessarily be prudish, but concerns about exploitation would likely mean some very sharp limits on pornography and prostitution. Laws against the classic common crimes—the use of force or fraud—would also be strictly enforced. (But note that strict enforcement doesn’t imply arbitrary police powers or brutal punishments, neither of which would appeal to the people of a high-H society.)
Fourth, it would be benevolent: high-H people want to cooperate rather than dominate, and a society of such people would give considerable humanitarian and development aid without trying to impose its will on others. A high-H society would be inclined toward pacifism, yet it would have a strong potential for self-defence, given the high level of trust and cohesion among its citizens. Still, the high-H society might be a victim of its own success: its high quality of life would likely attract not only high-H immigrants but low-H immigrants as well.
As you can see from our tour through the domains of money, power, and sex, dealing with low-H people is often unpleasant at best. In the next chapter, we’ll have some advice for identifying low-H people and for steering around them.