User Personality and User Satisfaction with Recommender Systems

• Published in: Information systems frontiers Vol. 20; no. 6; pp. 1173 - 1189
• Main Authors: Nguyen, Tien T., Maxwell Harper, F., Terveen, Loren, Konstan, Joseph A.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York Springer US 01.12.2018; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Business and Management; Control; Information systems; IT in Business; Management of Computing and Information Systems; Operations Research/Decision Theory; Personality; Personality traits; Ratings; Recommender systems; Serendipity; Systems Theory; User satisfaction; Human factors; Big-five personality traits; Recommendation diversity; Personality; User preferences; Recommendation popularity; Recommendation serendipity; Recommender systems
• ISSN: 1387-3326; 1572-9419
• DOI: 10.1007/s10796-017-9782-y

In this study, we show that individual users’ preferences for the level of diversity, popularity, and serendipity in recommendation lists cannot be inferred from their ratings alone. We demonstrate that we can extract strong signals about individual preferences for recommendation diversity, popularity and serendipity by measuring their personality traits. We conducted an online experiment with over 1,800 users for six months on a live recommendation system. In this experiment, we asked users to evaluate a list of movie recommendations with different levels of diversity, popularity, and serendipity. Then, we assessed users’ personality traits using the Ten-item Personality Inventory (TIPI). We found that ratings-based recommender systems may often fail to deliver preferred levels of diversity, popularity, and serendipity for their users (e.g. users with high-serendipity preferences). We also found that users with different personalities have different preferences for these three recommendation properties. Our work suggests that we can improve user satisfaction when we integrate users’ personality traits into the process of generating recommendations.