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A Psychologically-Realistic Personality Model for Virtual Agents

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Behavior Engineering and Applications

Abstract

The design of psychologically-realistic behavior in virtual agents should be based on the psychometrics that identify and quantify human psychological traits. Many personality models used in agent architectures simply treat the traits identified from personality theory as numeric inputs to control agent behavior. This results in agents with personalities that cannot be evaluated with psychometric instruments like personality inventories. This is because these models primarily consist of configuration variables. In this chapter, we use psychometrics to design a personality model for a virtual agent that can be evaluated using validated personality questionnaires. The personality model also generates sentiment, which the agent uses to decide how to respond to the questionnaire. The results indicate that by using International Personality Item Pool (IPIP) items to seed an agent’s memory, it is possible to create an agent with a personality that tests consistently across multiple personality inventories.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    These items are the statements that are used in personality inventories.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The University of the West Indies Cave Hill Campus, Bridgetown, WI, Barbados

    Curtis L. Gittens

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  1. Curtis L. Gittens
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Correspondence to Curtis L. Gittens .

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  1. School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of New South Wales, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

    Raymond Wong

  2. CSIRO, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia

    Chi-Hung Chi

  3. Faculty of Business and Information Technology, University of Ontario Institute of Technology, Oshawa, Ontario, Canada

    Patrick C. K. Hung

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Gittens, C.L. (2018). A Psychologically-Realistic Personality Model for Virtual Agents. In: Wong, R., Chi, CH., Hung, P. (eds) Behavior Engineering and Applications. International Series on Computer Entertainment and Media Technology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76430-6_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76430-6_4

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