Twenty Years of Personality Computing: Threats, Challenges and Future Directions
It addresses ethical threats like privacy and bias for applications in recruiting and healthcare, but is incremental as a review paper.
The paper provides an overview of Personality Computing, a field that uses computational methods to predict human personality traits from digital data, and discusses its ethical challenges and future directions.
Personality Computing is a field at the intersection of Personality Psychology and Computer Science. Started in 2005, research in the field utilizes computational methods to understand and predict human personality traits. The expansion of the field has been very rapid and, by analyzing digital footprints (text, images, social media, etc.), it helped to develop systems that recognize and even replicate human personality. While offering promising applications in talent recruiting, marketing and healthcare, the ethical implications of Personality Computing are significant. Concerns include data privacy, algorithmic bias, and the potential for manipulation by personality-aware Artificial Intelligence. This paper provides an overview of the field, explores key methodologies, discusses the challenges and threats, and outlines potential future directions for responsible development and deployment of Personality Computing technologies.