Brad Blanton's Radical Honesty and Straightforwardness (A2)

Brad Blanton is a psychotherapist who spent decades watching people exhaust themselves managing the gap between what they really thought and what they let others see. Radical Honesty is his blunt prescription: stop lying, including the small social lies we tell to smooth things over, because the effort of maintaining them is quietly draining us. His claim about the cost is stark, quoted in an essay on his work: "We all lie like hell. It wears us out. It is the major source of all human stress." How much you default to plain, unmanaged truth rather than the smoother version is, in the Big Five, one facet.

The default to plain truth is the Straightforwardness facet

That facet is Straightforwardness (A2), under Agreeableness, how frank and unfiltered you are versus how much you soften or stage-manage what you say. A high scorer says the true thing and trusts people to handle it; a low scorer is smoother, telling the version that keeps the peace or protects an image. Blanton sits at the far, uncompromising end of A2, arguing that even kind little lies split us into a performer and a real self, and that living the split is what wears us down. Radical honesty is A2 pushed past comfort into a way of life.

Blanton's extreme is a useful place to see the cost of the other pole, which touches Cooperation (A4). A very cooperative, low-straightforwardness person keeps harmony by shading the truth, and Blanton's whole case is that the harmony is expensive, paid for in tension you stop noticing. Most people will not go as far as he asks, and there are real reasons that some tact protects other people rather than just an image. For a lower-A2 reader the value is in the diagnosis more than the prescription, since even a step toward saying what you mean can lift a weight you had forgotten you were carrying.

For a reader placing themselves, your A2 is a fair read on how plainly you say what is true and how much energy goes into managing the impression instead. High on it and Blanton is validating an instinct you already follow, with the reminder that frankness lands better when it is not used as a weapon. Low on it and the book is a bracing look at what all that smoothing might be costing you underneath. Where you sit on Straightforwardness tells you how much of what you say is the plain truth and how much is performance, and we take the facet apart in Straightforwardness (A2).

Read the book: Radical Honesty: How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth by Brad Blanton.

See Where You Fall

Where do you actually fall? The 30-facet OCEAN personality test takes about 15 minutes and scores all five domains and the facets underneath them. Take the test

Research Citations