Personality Pairing Improves Human-AI Collaboration

Here we ask how AI agent "personalities" interact with human personalities, and other traits, to shape human-AI collaboration, productivity and performance. To estimate these relationships, we conducted a large-scale preregistered randomized experiment that paired 1,258 participants with AI agents that were prompted to exhibit varying levels of the Big Five personality traits. These human-AI teams produced 7,266 display ads for a real think tank, and the quality of these ads was evaluated by 1,995 independent human raters as well as in a field experiment conducted on X, which generated nearly 5 million impressions. We found, first, that personality pairing impacted teamwork quality. For example, neurotic AI improved teamwork for agreeable humans but impaired it for conscientious humans. Second, we found productivity effects of personality pairing and a "productivity-performance trade-off" in which certain pairings (e.g., agreeable human with neurotic AI) produced fewer ads but of higher quality. Third, personality pairing influenced ad quality and performance. For example, quality improved when open humans were paired with conscientious AI and when conscientious humans were paired with disagreeable AI. Some of these pairing effects were "jagged" in that they varied across text and visual tasks. For example open humans produced higher quality images but lower quality text when paired with agreeable AI. Pairing effects were also present in other human traits, like country of origin. For example, extroverted AI improved quality for Latin American workers, but degraded quality for East Asian workers. These findings demonstrate that human-AI personality alignment significantly improves collaboration, productivity, and performance and lay a foundation for future research on improving human-AI collaboration through AI personalization.