# Self-assessment, Exhibition, and Recognition: a Review of Personality in Large Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.17624 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17624/

## Key facts

- Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 40 of its 99 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Jun 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07258/) (2021)
- [RealToxicityPrompts: Evaluating Neural Toxic Degeneration in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.11462/) (2020)
- [PersonaLLM: Investigating the Ability of Large Language Models to Express Personality Traits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02547/) (2023)
- [From Persona to Personalization: A Survey on Role-Playing Language Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18231/) (2024)
- [InCharacter: Evaluating Personality Fidelity in Role-Playing Agents through Psychological Interviews](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17976/) (2023)
- [Understanding the Capabilities, Limitations, and Societal Impact of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02503/) (2021)
- [Who is GPT-3? An Exploration of Personality, Values and Demographics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14338/) (2022)
- [Can ChatGPT Assess Human Personalities? A General Evaluation Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01248/) (2023)
- [Building Emotional Support Chatbots in the Era of LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11584/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models as Superpositions of Cultural Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07870/) (2023)
- [Estimating the Personality of White-Box Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12000/) (2022)
- [You don't need a personality test to know these models are unreliable: Assessing the Reliability of Large Language Models on Psychometric Instruments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09718/) (2023)
- [Identifying and Manipulating the Personality Traits of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10276/) (2022)
- [Self-Assessment Tests are Unreliable Measures of LLM Personality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.08163/) (2023)
- [Have Large Language Models Developed a Personality?: Applicability of Self-Assessment Tests in Measuring Personality in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14693/) (2023)
- [Limited Ability of LLMs to Simulate Human Psychological Behaviours: a Psychometric Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.07248/) (2024)
- [Systematic Evaluation of GPT-3 for Zero-Shot Personality Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01183/) (2023)
- [PICLe: Eliciting Diverse Behaviors from Large Language Models with Persona In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.02501/) (2024)
- [Who is ChatGPT? Benchmarking LLMs' Psychological Portrayal Using PsychoBench](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01386/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models Show Human-like Social Desirability Biases in Survey Responses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.06058/) (2024)
- [Is ChatGPT a Good Personality Recognizer? A Preliminary Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03952/) (2023)
- [LLMs with Personalities in Multi-issue Negotiation Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.05248/) (2024)
- [PsyCoT: Psychological Questionnaire as Powerful Chain-of-Thought for Personality Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.20256/) (2023)
- [Simulating Human Strategic Behavior: Comparing Single and Multi-agent LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.08189/) (2024)
- [LLMvsSmall Model? Large Language Model Based Text Augmentation Enhanced Personality Detection Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07581/) (2024)
- [PHAnToM: Persona-based Prompting Has An Effect on Theory-of-Mind Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02246/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Identifying and Manipulating Personality Traits in LLMs Through Activation Engineering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10427/) (2024)
- [Humanizing LLMs: A Survey of Psychological Measurements with Tools, Datasets, and Human-Agent Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.00049/) (2025)
- [Neuron-based Personality Trait Induction in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.12327/) (2024)
- [Personality as a Probe for LLM Evaluation: Method Trade-offs and Downstream Effects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.04794/) (2025)
- [AI-exhibited Personality Traits Can Shape Human Self-concept through Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.12727/) (2026)
- [Integrating Personality into Digital Humans: A Review of LLM-Driven Approaches for Virtual Reality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16457/) (2025)
- [Prompting-in-a-Series: Psychology-Informed Contents and Embeddings for Personality Recognition With Decoder-Only Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.06991/) (2025)
- [Dynamic Personality Adaptation in Large Language Models via State Machines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.22157/) (2026)
- [The use of GPT-4o and Other Large Language Models for the Improvement and Design of Self-Assessment Scales for Measurement of Interpersonal Communication Skills](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.14050/) (2024)
- [Cross-Lingual Attention Distillation with Personality-Informed Generative Augmentation for Multilingual Personality Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.08851/) (2026)
- [The Shared Latent Structure of LLM Psychometric Responses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.05080/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

As large language models (LLMs) appear to behave increasingly human-like in text-based interactions, more and more researchers become interested in investigating personality in LLMs. However, the diversity of psychological personality research and the rapid development of LLMs have led to a broad yet fragmented landscape of studies in this interdisciplinary field. Extensive studies across different research focuses, different personality psychometrics, and different LLMs make it challenging to have a holistic overview and further pose difficulties in applying findings to real-world applications. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review by categorizing current studies into three research problems: self-assessment, exhibition, and recognition, based on the intrinsic characteristics and external manifestations of personality in LLMs. For each problem, we provide a thorough analysis and conduct in-depth comparisons of their corresponding solutions. Besides, we summarize research findings and open challenges from current studies and further discuss their underlying causes. We also collect extensive publicly available resources to facilitate interested researchers and developers. Lastly, we discuss the potential future research directions and application scenarios. Our paper is the first comprehensive survey of up-to-date literature on personality in LLMs. By presenting a clear taxonomy, in-depth analysis, promising future directions, and extensive resource collections, we aim to provide a better understanding and facilitate further advancements in this emerging field.