Beyond Traits: Social Context Based Personality Model

Abstract

The relation between individual's personality and environmental context is a key issue in psychology, recently also in character simulations. This paper contributes to both domains by proposing a socio-cognitive, contextual personality model - a new voice in a century old problem of personality, but also an approach to simulating groups of more human-like agents. After analyzing the influence of popularity of 'trait personality models' on psychology and computer simulation, we propose Social Context based Personality model - a continuation and specification of the Cognitive-Affective Personality System theory. The discussion, model and implementation are provided, followed by an example application in a domain of school bullying. Extensive simulations were conducted as model's validation, showing model's potential in generation of contextual and multidimensional personalities both for individual and group simulations.