The Quiet Personality Signals Behind Who Uses AI

Ask why one person leans on an AI chatbot daily while another barely touches it, and the easy answer is practical: different jobs, different needs. But underneath the practical story there is a psychological one. Our personalities shape not just whether we pick up a new tool but the private reasons we do it, and those reasons are often invisible even to us. A survey of nearly 800 ChatGPT users set out to trace those hidden channels, and the map it produced is more interesting than a simple "curious people use AI more."

The study, led by Tingjun Deng and colleagues at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, surveyed 784 people in early 2023, all of whom had used ChatGPT at least once [1]. The participants skewed young, with an average age of about 24, and the researchers used a statistical technique that can test several linked relationships at once. The goal was to see how three well-studied personality traits, extraversion, openness, and conscientiousness, connected to how much people actually used the chatbot, and, crucially, what carried that connection.

The direct route and the scenic route

The first finding is straightforward. Extraversion had a direct, positive link to chatbot use [1]. The more outgoing someone was, the more they tended to reach for the tool. That fits a familiar picture of extraverts as quick to engage with novelty and comfortable putting new things to use.

The more revealing finding is about the other two traits. Openness and conscientiousness showed little direct relationship to how often people used ChatGPT. Their influence was real, but it traveled by a more roundabout path, through two psychological bridges the researchers measured [1]. The first bridge is social image, the sense that using the tool says something flattering about you. The second is computer self-efficacy, your confidence that you can handle technology without floundering.

So a conscientious person did not necessarily use ChatGPT more just because they were organized and diligent. But conscientiousness was strongly tied to feeling capable with computers, and that confidence, in turn, fed actual use [1]. Openness worked in a similar indirect way. The traits mattered, but they mattered by shaping how people felt about the tool and about themselves, not by pushing behavior directly.

Why the bridges are the story

It is tempting to skim past the mediators as statistical bookkeeping, but they are arguably the most human part of the result. All three traits, the study found, were linked to a sense of social prestige around using the tool. That points to something we do not always admit: adopting a new technology is partly a social performance. Part of why we take up a tool is what it seems to say about us, whether it marks us as capable, current, or ahead of the curve.

That framing changes how you might read the current wave of AI adoption. It is not purely a story of usefulness winning people over. It is also a story of identity and self-belief, of people gravitating toward, or away from, a tool based on whether it fits the person they think they are and feel able to be. The stance you bring shapes what happens next, too. Once someone is at the keyboard, their goals steer the exchange, which is why the same system can produce deep learning or shallow point-scoring depending on intent, a dynamic explored in work on how a learner's goal changes what they get from ChatGPT. Personality helps decide who shows up; mindset helps decide what they walk away with.

Holding the findings loosely

Several limits deserve a clear-eyed mention. This was a cross-sectional survey, a single snapshot in time, so it can reveal associations but not prove that a trait causes anything. It leaned entirely on self-reports, which carry the usual risk that people describe themselves as they wish to be. And the sample was narrow in an important way: young, based in China, and composed only of people who had already tried the chatbot. That leaves out older adults, other cultures, and, tellingly, everyone who has chosen never to use the tool at all, which is exactly the group a full account of adoption would need.

With those caveats in place, the useful idea survives. Personality does not push us toward AI in one blunt motion. It works through quieter mechanisms, the status we sense in using a tool and the confidence we feel handling it. If we want to understand why adoption is so uneven, the answer is not only in the technology's features. It is in the psychology of the people deciding whether it is for them. For more on the human side of these tools, browse our wider artificial-intelligence coverage.

Sources

1. Deng, T., Wang, D., Ma, J., Wang, T., Li, B., Hussain, T., Yue, Y., & Wang, P. (2025). Associations Between Personality Traits and ChatGPT Usage: The Dual Mediating Roles of Social Image and Computer Self-Efficacy. The Journal of Psychology, 160(3). https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00223980.2025.2568758
2. Deng, T., et al. (2025). Associations Between Personality Traits and ChatGPT Usage [Record]. CoLab. https://colab.ws/articles/10.1080/00223980.2025.2568758

This article summarizes published research for general informational purposes only and does not constitute professional advice.