Exploring Relations between Personality and User Rating Behaviors

In this study, we conducted an online survey and collected 86 reliable responses on both a personality assessment inventory and ratings retail products ratings, with the aim of investigating whether personality characteristics have an impact on user rating behaviors. Besides personality factors, another four independent variables (i.e., age, gender, previous experience on using recommenders and e-commerce systems) were taken into account when we examined the relationship. The correlation analysis results show that Conscientiousness is negatively correlated with the number of total ratings, category coverage and interest diversity. Individuals high on Agreeableness tend to give more positive ratings. In addition, Gender plays a significant role on all rating behavior variables except percentage of positive ratings. We further explored users’ personality profiles along the long tail of the number of ratings. We found that users high on Openness tend to rate more items than required, while low Conscientiousness is a critical factor which provokes users to rate items in an explosive way. Our findings are useful for researchers interested in user modeling, preference elicitation, recommender systems and online marketing.