Personality Anchoring for Social Simulation: Linking Personality, Social Behavior, and Interaction Success with LLM Agents

2026-06-05

AI Summary

This study systematically investigates how combinations of interpersonal personality traits—particularly agreeableness—affect interaction outcomes across diverse social contexts. Leveraging the CHARISMA simulation framework, the authors propose a “personality anchoring” method that employs film and public figures as psychological anchors to construct multi-LLM agents with stable personality expressions, enabling reproducible and contextually robust social simulations. Integrating behavioral mediation analysis with high inter-simulation consistency (ICC = 0.89), the research demonstrates that dyads high in agreeableness achieve significantly higher goal attainment rates (62%) compared to low-agreeableness dyads (6%), an effect mediated by cooperative strategies and non-explicit pathways. This work bridges psychological theory with LLM-based agent modeling, offering a novel paradigm for computational social psychology.

Abstract

Social interactions are shaped by the interplay of dispositional traits and situational context, yet systematically investigating how personality configurations between individuals jointly influence social behavior across diverse social contexts remains methodologically challenging. We address this gap by introducing a simulation pipeline adapted from the CHARISMA framework, which employs well-known movie characters and public figures as psychologically grounded agents for multi-LLM social simulation using a method we term personality anchoring. We present a large-scale empirical study examining how dyadic Agreeableness composition influences social interaction outcomes across 1,010 simulated conversations. Our results reveal a monotonic relationship between dyadic Agreeableness composition and shared goal achievement, with Homogeneous-Agreeable pairs achieving success 10 times the rate of Homogeneous-Disagreeable pairs (62% vs. 6%). Behavioral mediation analysis reveals that Agreeableness shapes goal achievement partially through cooperative strategy selection, though it continues to predict outcomes within the same dominant strategy, indicating pathways beyond observable conversational behavior. Robustness analyses confirm high consistency of results across repeated simulations (ICC = 0.89) and stable personality expression across diverse scenarios, validating personality anchoring as a viable operationalization strategy.

Problem

• personality
• social interaction
• Agreeableness
• social simulation
• interaction success

Innovation

• personality anchoring
• LLM agents
• social simulation
• Agreeableness
• behavioral mediation