Gamified Personality Assessment

Abstract

Abstract. Unobtrusive behavioral cues of personality traits can be found in physical and virtual environments (e.g., office environments and social media profiles), but detecting and coding such cues are a painstaking effort, and therefore impractical for research purposes. Measuring people’s choices in a virtual, gamified environment may offer a suitable substitute. It is currently unknown whether Honesty-Humility can also be assessed in a virtual environment. In two studies, we demonstrate that Honesty-Humility can be inferred with at least modest validity from virtual behavior cues. In a third study, we tested the fakeability of the virtual cues. This study found that even under faking instructions the virtual cues were related to Honesty-Humility, however, the virtual cues were just as fakeable as self-reported Honesty-Humility. Our results imply that virtual cues can be incorporated in serious games to measure personality. Future research may investigate whether the identified virtual cues are able to predict important Honesty-Humility related outcomes.