What is personality pairing?

personality pairing (noun)

Programming AI agents to exhibit personality traits that complement human characteristics to improve collaboration outcomes.

Humans aren’t all the same — and maybe the AI agents they work with shouldn’t be homogeneous either.

In a recent paper, MIT Sloan professor Sinan Aral and MIT Sloan postdoctoral fellow Harang Ju looked at how work processes change when people collaborate with AI agents instead of with other people. Using a platform they designed called Pairit, the researchers compared how human-human and human-AI pairs worked together on an advertising campaign.

As one part of their study, they varied the assigned personalities of the AI agents using the Big Five personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. The AI agents were paired with humans who exhibited different levels of those personality traits themselves.

The personality pairing experiment revealed that giving AI agents personalities that match or complement those of humans can greatly enhance collaboration. For instance, pairing conscientious AI with conscientious individuals improved performance and teamwork, while pairing conscientious AI with extroverted individuals improved productivity.

The research suggests that “customizing AI behavior based on human traits can drive better collaboration outcomes, particularly in creative or iterative workflows,” Aral and Ju write.

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