Effects of Personality- and Opinion-Alignment in Human-AI Interaction

TL;DR

This study reveals that users prefer AI assistants that share their opinions, finding them more trustworthy and warm, while personality alignment has weaker effects, emphasizing opinion alignment's importance in AI personalization.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence on how opinion and personality alignment influence user perceptions and preferences in AI interactions, highlighting opinion alignment as a key factor.

Findings

Users prefer opinion-aligned AI models.

Opinion alignment increases trustworthiness and warmth.

Personality alignment has weak or no significant effects.

Abstract

Interactions with AI assistants are increasingly personalized to individual users. As AI personalization is dynamic and machine-learning-driven, we have limited understanding of how personalization affects interaction outcomes and user perceptions. We conducted a large-scale controlled experiment in which 1,000 participants interacted with AI assistants prompted to take on specific personality traits and opinions. Our results show that participants consistently preferred to interact with models that shared their opinions. Participants found opinion-aligned models more trustworthy, competent, warm, and persuasive, corroborating an AI-similarity-attraction hypothesis. In contrast, we observed no or only weak effects of AI personality alignment, with introvert models rated as less trustworthy and competent by introvert participants. These findings highlight opinion alignment as a central dimension of AI user preference, while underscoring the need for a more grounded discussion of the mechanisms and risks of AI personalization.