Apparent Psychological Profiles of Large Language Models are Largely a Measurement Artifact
Psychological instruments designed for humans are increasingly used to assign large language models (LLMs) stable psychological profiles that affect their usability, safety assessment, and use as proxies for human participants in research. Using a formal psychometric framework, we show that these profiles are largely a measurement artifact. Administering a battery of personality and risk-preference instruments spanning self-reports and behavioral tasks to 56 instruction-tuned LLMs alongside large human reference samples, we report four findings. First, differences between models are driven not by the traits an instrument targets but by a directional response bias, a tendency to respond to...
| Authors | Jelena Meyer, David Garcia, Dirk U. Wulff |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 18 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 18 June 2026 |
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