What does artificial intelligence want to know about personality psychology? It’s not electric sheep. We asked ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, to design interview questions about personality psychology for a special AI-driven episode of The Science of Personality. As it so happens, ChatGPT seemed to have an interest in actionable, practical insights.
On episode 147 of The Science of Personality, personality psychology experts and cohosts Ryne Sherman, PhD, and Blake Loepp answered questions posed by ChatGPT about personality psychology, leadership, and team dynamics.i
The conversation ranges from how stable personality is over time to what role personality psychology should play in the development of AI agents.
Personality Psychology
If most organizations say they value certain personality traits (e.g., humility, collaboration), but reward others (e.g., dominance, self-promotion), what actually predicts success?
The key to this question is one’s definition of success. At Hogan, we distinguish between leadership emergence and effectiveness. Leadership emergence concerns gaining leadership roles and seeming leaderlike. Leadership effectiveness concerns building and maintaining a high-performing team. In other words, one type of success is about yourself and the other is about your team.
Organizations that reward dominance and self-promotion before humility and collaboration value emergence above effectiveness, whether they say so or not. Team outcomes and organizational outcomes are ultimately more significant than individual outcomes, which means that organizations ought to value and reward leadership effectiveness.
You both study personality professionally—so where do you still see yourselves falling into predictable personality traps in your own work or collaboration?
Ryne said he falls into the trap of assuming he’s an expert on other people’s personalities, even if they’ve just met. He tends to believe he can predict how someone will behave based on his judgment of their personality.
Blake said he has to be mindful of a particular scale combination in his personality data: high HDS Dutiful and high HPI Interpersonal Sensitivity. Dutiful relates to trying to please others, and when combined with Interpersonal Sensitivity, the combination can result in an inability to say no for fear of hurting others’ feelings.
How stable is personality in practice within organizations? Do people really change, or do they just learn how to strategically adapt?
Personality psychology research shows that personality tends to be quite stable over time. A person’s reputation, or how others view their personality, is usually similar across a variety of contexts as seen by different people. Often, personality is so consistent that it doesn’t take others long to tell how someone is likely to behave. However, strategically adapting one’s behavioral approaches in the workplace or elsewhere is both possible and advantageous. One of the goals of personality assessment is to build strategic self-awareness to enable behavioral adaptation and increase effectiveness.
Leadership
What’s something personality psychology gets wrong—or at least oversimplifies—when applied to leadership selection?
Nonexperts tend to focus on the wrong personality dimensions, such as confidence, charisma, and charm. Meanwhile, even experts can get it wrong by trying to define one ideal leadership profile. Leadership effectiveness cannot be confined to a single personality profile because a variety of profiles can lead to highly successful leadership.
Also, some personality psychology theories wrongly hold that traits cause behaviors. In reality, people don’t always know why they do what they do. Thus, traits are merely descriptive. While those descriptions are useful for predicting how someone might behave in the future, they don’t explain the causes of someone’s behavior.
What’s the most common way leaders misinterpret personality assessments like the Hogan tools?
Misunderstandings around the HDS scales tend to center on the assumption that the dark side of personality is bad. But high scores aren’t always bad, and low scores aren’t always good. Elevations on the HDS indicate personality strengths that could potentially become overused if not managed.
Another common misinterpretation comes from a concept in personality psychology called egosyntonic personality. That means most people tend to like their own personalities. This causes them to assume that their personality assessment results are good without considering the potential downsides of their scores, whether high or low.
What personality traits become more dangerous as someone gains power or authority?
At Hogan, we say that power doesn’t corrupt, it reveals. Dark-side personality traits emerge when leaders gain power and reduce self-monitoring or managing how they present themselves. Many executives get into danger from elevations on the Moving Against cluster of scales on the HDS: Bold, Mischievous, Colorful, and Imaginative. Without self-monitoring (or receiving and listening to critical feedback), executives’ Moving Against behaviors can potentially harm their careers, teams, and organizations.
Team Dynamics
If you could design the ideal team from a personality standpoint, would you optimize for similarity, complementarity, or something else entirely?
High-performing teams, like effective leaders, don’t come with a formula. Hogan research on team personality indicates no ideal combination of personalities exists. The key to team dynamics is understanding how to work together functionally, communicate productively, and have healthy conflict. Learning about each other’s personalities helps team members better coordinate work tasks in a complementary way.
How should organizations think about the tradeoff between hiring high performers who may be toxic versus solid performers who elevate team dynamics?
Some data suggest that organizations need to hire four superstar performers to offset the hidden costs of one toxic employee. Avoiding the hire of someone who will create a toxic workplace environment is extremely important because of the hidden potential costs. For instance, in recruiting elite athletes, scouts search not only for performing at a high level but also for handling adversity well. All other skills being equal, a potential recruit who cheers teammates is better for the team than one who does not.
Looking ahead five to ten years, how do you think personality psychology will need to evolve in an AI-driven workplace where AI agents may replace or augment human roles?
To what extent should AI agents have a personality? Are there certain characteristics expressed by agents that are better suited for certain roles? You might expect a customer service AI agent to be friendly and polite, for instance. As well, personality impacts how successfully individuals work in an AI-driven workplace. The rise of AI agents will likely amplify the need for communication and interpersonal skills as core workplace competencies.
“One of the big questions we have to figure out is to what extent does personality psychology need to advise on the creation, development, production, and use of AI agents?” Ryne said.
Listen to this conversation in full on episode 147 of The Science of Personality. Never miss an episode by following us anywhere you get podcasts. Cheers, everybody!
Note
i. Blake prompted: “My name is Blake Loepp and I am one of the hosts of The Science of Personality podcast. My cohost, Ryne Sherman, and I are wanting to have you on as a guest, but YOU will be asking us the questions you want to learn more about as it pertains to personality psychology, leadership, and team dynamics. What 10 questions would you like to ask us for this episode?”
ChatGPT replied: “That’s a really cool twist on the format—basically flipping the interviewer/interviewee dynamic. If I’m in the guest seat asking you questions, I’d focus on things that surface real-world insight, tension, and practical application (not just theory).”