Personality Engineering with AI Agents: A New Methodology for Negotiation Research
Quick Answer
The article introduces 'personality engineering,' a methodology leveraging AI agents to enhance negotiation research by manipulating and evaluating negotiator personalities using the interpersonal circumplex model.
Quick Take
This approach allows for rigorous testing of negotiation theories and practical design of AI negotiation agents.
Key Points
- Personality engineering uses AI to parameterize negotiator personality for research.
- The interpersonal circumplex model focuses on warmth and dominance dimensions.
- This methodology enables controlled experiments to test negotiation theories.
- AI agents can consistently manage negotiation tensions that humans struggle with.
- The approach aids in designing effective AI negotiation agents.
Paper Resources
📖 Reader Mode
~2 min readAbstract:According to canonical negotiation theory, people's success in a negotiation depends on how well they balance competing demands--empathizing and asserting, demonstrating concern for other and concern for self, being soft on the people and hard on the problem. Yet people struggle to manage these tensions, so researchers have lacked the ability to rigorously test the field's prescriptions under controlled conditions. AI agents do not face the same limitations, and their precision, repertoire, consistency, and scalability enable a new class of experiments to contribute to negotiation theory. In this article, we introduce personality engineering: a methodology that uses AI agents to precisely parameterize, manipulate, and evaluate negotiator personality. We propose using the interpersonal circumplex--and its two core dimensions of warmth and dominance--as a foundational coordinate system for the field. This approach offers both a rigorous methodology for testing classic negotiation theories and a practical guide for designing the personalities of AI negotiation agents.
| Subjects: | Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC); Social and Information Networks (cs.SI) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2605.20554 [cs.AI] |
| (or arXiv:2605.20554v1 [cs.AI] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.20554 arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration) |
Submission history
From: Michelle Vaccaro [view email]
[v1]
Tue, 19 May 2026 23:11:19 UTC (480 KB)
— Originally published at arxiv.org
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