The study,"How well can an AI chatbot infer personality?: Examining psychometric properties of machine-inferred personality scores," was recently published in theSun is a co-leading author with researchers from Auburn University, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the University of South Florida-St. Petersburg and the United States Air Force Academy. The American Psychological Association also designated the article as a high-impact article.
To examine the properties of the AI personality scores, the researchers had each participant engage in a conversation with an AI chatbot for 20–30 minutes and complete self-reported personality assessments for comparison. Grade point average and peer-rated college adjustment were used to measure personality outcomes. Researchers also used participants' chat responses to train the AI to predict the self-reported personality scores.
The researchers found that the AI personality scores satisfied many of the standards that help researchers evaluate the quality of a psychological test. The scores were consistent and similar to the self-reported personality measures. In some analyses, like when measuring the ability of extroversion to predict GPA and college adjustment, AI scores had predictive power that extended beyond self-reported personality scores.
"Our study provides promising support for the future of machine learning techniques in personality assessment," said Sun."As these techniques become more common in employee selection, organizations should be aware that this might help them save time and still accurately measure personality. More research is needed to learn whether it is fair toSun is an expert in industrial-organizational psychology and studies personnel selection, individual differences and quantitative methods.