Inferring Big Five Personality Factors using Text Analysis Its Assessment and Impact on Prosocial Behavior and IS Security Compliance
Abstract
Advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) in general and text mining in particular have resulted in a number of services and applications that infer and provide personality measures from text. The validity of these services, however, has not been subjected to serious empirical scrutiny. The first essay is conducted to validate three services/programs, namely, IBM Watson Personality Insights, Indico, and Personality Recognizer. Specifically, this essay compares the results of these services with those obtained from traditional personality questionnaires. Simple and short essays written by two hundred and fifty-six university students/subjects served as inputs to the personality service programs, while traditional personality measures were assessed using an empirically validated personality questionnaire. The results from both data generation techniques were then compared. Results show that most of the assessments differ. However, there is similarity between the traditional questionnaires and IBM Watson Personality Insights in the case of extraversion measures. Both Indico and Personality Recognizer also showed similarity in the prediction of openness. The second study deals with the relationship between the Big Five and both prosocial moral reasoning and propensity to help. The same subjects from the first study completed a survey in which they were asked to choose whether to help after being given situational scenarios about individuals in need of help. The results of a mediation model showed that both conscientiousness and emotional stability were positively and significantly related to propensity to help. The third essay examines the moderating effect of the Big Five personality traits on the relationship between conflict in the work setting and noncompliance behavior (using proprietary information for one’s own personal advantage rather than that of one’s company). After collecting survey responses from the same students from the first two studies, and applying moderation to it using SPSS, we find that both conscientiousness and emotional stability moderate the relationship while the other three of the Big Five (openness, extraversion, and agreeableness) do not. Conflict was found to be negatively and significantly related to noncompliance behavior. The implications of the research for theory and practice are discussed.