Going beyond traits

Abstract

Recent studies in social and personality psychology introduced the notion of personality states conceived as concrete behaviors that can be described as having the same contents as traits. Our paper is a first step towards addressing automatically this new perspective. In particular, we will focus on the classification of excerpts of social behavior into personality states corresponding to the Big Five traits, rather than focusing on the more traditional goal of using those behaviors to directly infer about the personality traits of the person producing them. The multimodal behavioral cues we exploit were obtained by means of the Sociometric Badges worn by people working at a research institution for a period of six weeks. We investigate the effectiveness of cues concerning acted social behaviors as well as of other situational characteristics for the sake of personality state classification. The encouraging results show that our classifiers always, and sometimes greatly, improve the performances of a random baseline classifier (from 1.5 to 1.8 better than chance). At a general level, we believe that these results support the proposed shift from the classification of personality traits to the classification of personality states.