A Preliminary Study of the Impact of Personality on Satisfaction in Group Contexts

When groups of people conduct recommended activities together, several factors affect their individual satisfaction. This includes the satisfaction of the other group members, due to phenomena such as interpersonal social influence and emotional contagion. To model the change in individual satisfaction in a group context, it is important to consider factors like the individual personality and the type of relationships between group members. This research aims to investigate how individual satisfaction related to a group activity is influenced by the preferences of other people present. We focus on groups with two members, in the context of listening to music. We performed an exploratory user study (n=26; 13 pairs), finding that people adjust their preferences to their companion, but we did not see an effect of the impact of tie strength (friend vs. stranger). We also found indications that personality traits can predict whether participants are more (Dominating and Avoiding), or less likely (Agreeableness) to adjust their preferences to their companion. Although influenced by the limited sample size, our results support the hypothesis that individual personalities impact the individual satisfaction shift. However, measuring different phenomena that can affect users' behaviors in the considered experimental setting seems crucial, and deeper investigations with a larger sample size are necessary to produce more robust results.