A Preliminary Analysis on Self and Peer Evaluation of Personality Models for Recommender Systems

Personality has been introduced in recommender systems to address the cold-start problem, or to improve the recommendations by personalizing the degree of diversity for the specific user. For group recommender systems, personality has also been considered to select the most appropriate strategy for aggregating individual preferences or to model the dynamics of the group decision-making process. The most widely used models in this context are the Five Factor Model (FFM) and the Conflict Resolution Styles model (TKI or ROCI II). However, the challenge of eliciting this information remains an open problem, along with establishing correlations between self- and peer-evaluations of personality. In this work, we present the results of a preliminary study investigating the correlations between self and peer evaluations of personality. Furthermore, we analysed the correlations between the two personality models. Our findings show good consistency between self and peer personality evaluations for the FFM, but not for conflict resolution styles. This suggests that the FFM peer evaluations could be considered an alternative to self-evaluations. In contrast, for the conflict resolution styles, it may be necessary to measure both self and peer evaluations. This is relevant in group recommendation scenarios, where how group members perceive each other could impact the group decision-making process. Finally, our findings reveal correlations between the two personality models but do not support a consistent way to derive one from the other.