# Implicit Personality Representations in Humans and LLMs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.12704 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.12704/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Sparse Autoencoders Find Highly Interpretable Features in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.08600/) (2023)
- [Inference-Time Intervention: Eliciting Truthful Answers from a Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03341/) (2023)
- [Towards Understanding Sycophancy in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13548/) (2023)
- [Refusal in Language Models Is Mediated by a Single Direction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11717/) (2024)
- [Whose Opinions Do Language Models Reflect?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17548/) (2023)
- [The Geometry of Truth: Emergent Linear Structure in Large Language Model Representations of True/False Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06824/) (2023)
- [Evaluating the Moral Beliefs Encoded in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14324/) (2023)
- [Improving Instruction-Following in Language Models through Activation Steering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.12877/) (2024)
- [In-Context Impersonation Reveals Large Language Models' Strengths and Biases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14930/) (2023)
- [Human alignment of neural network representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.01201/) (2022)
- [Do LLMs Have Distinct and Consistent Personality? TRAIT: Personality Testset designed for LLMs with Psychometrics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14703/) (2024)
- [Who's asking? User personas and the mechanics of latent misalignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12094/) (2024)
- [PICLe: Eliciting Diverse Behaviors from Large Language Models with Persona In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.02501/) (2024)
- [Deep Lexical Hypothesis: Identifying personality structure in natural language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02092/) (2022)
- [Rediscovering the Latent Dimensions of Personality with Large Language Models as Trait Descriptors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.09905/) (2024)
- [Measuring Pragmatic Influence in Large Language Model Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.21223/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

A century of psychology has found that the trait words people use to describe one another vary, but the relational structure among those traits, which ones go together and which oppose, is strikingly consistent across raters and cultures. We test whether the LLM (Qwen 2.5-7B-Instruct) reproduces this structure in its internal trait representations. From millions of crowd-sourced personality ratings of fictional characters, we build a human implicit-personality matrix over hundreds of traits; from contrastive model activations, we build a matching matrix over the same traits. The two relational structures align strongly (Mantel r = 0.77), and the agreement holds trait by trait as well as in aggregate. Two dominant axes of the model's trait representations recover the social and intellectual dimensions long known to organize human personality impressions, social warmth and intellectual competence. On held-out dialogue, projecting model activations onto these directions yields personality profiles that agree with human ratings. This work establishes a framework that enables comprehensive, human-grounded comparison between internal model trait geometry and the shared structure of human personality impressions.