# Evaluating Personality Traits in Large Language Models: Insights from Psychological Questionnaires

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.05248 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05248/

## Key facts

- Cited by 25 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 4 of its 12 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Feb 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [PersonaLLM: Investigating the Ability of Large Language Models to Express Personality Traits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02547/) (2023)
- [Personality Traits in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00184/) (2023)
- [Evaluating and Inducing Personality in Pre-trained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07550/) (2022)
- [Who is GPT-3? An Exploration of Personality, Values and Demographics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14338/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [The Personality Illusion: Revealing Dissociation Between Self-Reports & Behavior in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.03730/) (2025)
- [Can LLM Agents Maintain a Persona in Discourse?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11843/) (2025)
- [Humanizing LLMs: A Survey of Psychological Measurements with Tools, Datasets, and Human-Agent Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.00049/) (2025)
- [Stable and Explainable Personality Trait Evaluation in Large Language Models with Internal Activations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.09833/) (2026)
- [Persona Generators: Generating Diverse Synthetic Personas for Arbitrary Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.03545/) (2026)
- [Activation-Space Personality Steering: Hybrid Layer Selection for Stable Trait Control in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.03738/) (2025)
- [Do Personality Traits Interfere? Geometric Limitations of Steering in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.15847/) (2026)
- [PTCBENCH: Benchmarking Contextual Stability of Personality Traits in LLM Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.00016/) (2026)
- [An LLM-Native Psychometric Instrument Reveals a Self-Report--Behavior Gap Across 25 Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.09843/) (2026)
- [Understanding Persuasive Interactions between Generative Social Agents and Humans: The Knowledge-based Persuasion Model (KPM)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.11483/) (2026)
- [AI Agents Alone Are Not (Yet) Sufficient for Social Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.00113/) (2026)
- [GenPT: Beyond Self-Report for Reliable LLM Psychometrics via Generative Projective Testing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.00860/) (2026)
- [Twenty Years of Personality Computing: Threats, Challenges and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02082/) (2025)
- [Integrating Personality into Digital Humans: A Review of LLM-Driven Approaches for Virtual Reality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16457/) (2025)
- [Quantifying Data Contamination in Psychometric Evaluations of LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.07175/) (2025)
- [Quantifying and Mitigating Socially Desirable Responding in LLMs: A Desirability-Matched Graded Forced-Choice Psychometric Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.17262/) (2026)
- [MOSAIC: Unveiling the Moral, Social and Individual Dimensions of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.00048/) (2026)
- [ExtremeAIGC: Benchmarking LMM Vulnerability to AI-Generated Extremist Content](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09964/) (2025)
- [When AI Takes the Couch: Psychometric Jailbreaks Reveal Internal Conflict in Frontier Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.04124/) (2025)
- [The Narcissus Hypothesis: Descending to the Rung of Illusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.17999/) (2025)
- [Who are you, ChatGPT? Personality and Demographic Style in LLM-Generated Content](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.11434/) (2025)
- [Enhancing Debunking Effectiveness through LLM-based Personality Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.09533/) (2026)
- [Explicit Trait Inference for Multi-Agent Coordination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.19278/) (2026)
- [Inverse Theory of Mind Modeling for Content Recommendation: From Web Browsing to Dynamic Intelligent Interfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.11354/) (2026)
- [Moral Combat: Exploiting Moral Foundations Theory to Jailbreak LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.19587/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Psychological assessment tools have long helped humans understand behavioural patterns. While Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate content comparable to that of humans, we explore whether they exhibit personality traits. To this end, this work applies psychological tools to LLMs in diverse scenarios to generate personality profiles. Using established trait-based questionnaires such as the Big Five Inventory and by addressing the possibility of training data contamination, we examine the dimensional variability and dominance of LLMs across five core personality dimensions: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. Our findings reveal that LLMs exhibit unique dominant traits, varying characteristics, and distinct personality profiles even within the same family of models.