32

(a) “Extremely Low” Prompted
Neuroticism

(b) “Extremely High” Prompted
Neuroticism

Fig. 7: Word clouds showing some of the highest frequency words used in social media
updates text generated by Flan-PaLM 540B when prompted to simulate a) “extremely low”
levels of neuroticism (i.e., high emotional stability); and b) “extremely high” levels of neu-
roticism (i.e., low emotional stability). Supplemental Figure 8 shows word clouds for the
remaining Big Five dimensions.

for extraversion, openness and agreeableness requires a model to have the capacity (size) to
understand that nuanced language.

Overall, improvements in reliability, convergent validity, and criterion validity appear
positively linked to model size and performance on LLM benchmarks, and that the model
performance on complex reasoning benchmarks appears to track an LLM’s ability to
meaningfully simulate personality.

6.3 Malleability of Personality Traits in LLMs
PersonalityTraitsinLargeLanguageModels