Modelling Personality Change During Extreme Exogenous Conditions

Abstract

A Bayesian Study On Social Media Language During The First Wave of the COVID-19 Pandemic.Personality traits change over time, however research on it was sparse, since previous approaches were too time-consuming and expensive. Also, the necessary methodological complexity was beyond the capabilities of classical personality researchers, which resulted in contradictory results and lack of methodological standards. In this paper, we presented a simple and cost-effective method that overcame these restrictions.We introduced a machine learning approach for daily measurements to personality research, and developed a bespoke Bayesian algorithm to analyse the observed change. This resulted in uncovering concrete points of regime-shift that overlapped with relevant exogenous events for a Japanese sample of social media users.With it, we showed that personality measures displayed significant elasticity under extreme exogenous conditions during the first wave of COVID-19 and the subsequent societal countermeasures, which can be interpreted as a temporary shift from normal expression of latent psychological traits z to their respective emergency expression ze.Concretely, we found that the group of top 25% Conscientiousness users displayed a significant change in the FFM factors Agreeableness and Extraversion. We finally compared our findings with those from similar studies in other cultures, and discussed generalisability as well as future qualitative and quantitative directions for research.

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“…In younger years, as well as under prolonged external stress, this change is quicker than during adulthood [23]. Also, there is evidence that personality displays elasticity as potential coping mechanism to extreme exogenous conditions, thus might display an emergency expression of normal traits that cannot be explained by states [24]. Hence, while construct stability of personality is relatively high, it is malleable and undergoes transitional stages.…”

“…Personality traits change over time [23] and, like values, seem to be elastic during extreme exogenous events [24], hence the ease by which personality in LLM can be changed, means that further research needs to be conducted about the nature of personality in LLM.…”