Predicting Job Performance from Personality Displayed in Video Games

RM 218

This research investigates video games as a technology that may facilitate more accurate and fair personality assessments in the hiring of employees. By using the data automatically generated from a player's behavior and preferences within the game, video games can provide data points that can be used to accurately measure personality (Yee et al., 2011; Tekofsky et al., 2013; Canossa et al., 2015) There is also evidence that suggests personality can predict job performance (Barrick & Mount, 1991; Borman & Motowildo, 1997). It logically follows that videogames can predict job performance, but there has been no academic paper published on this. Video games have the potential to remove the systematic bias and error that can be introduced into the assessment process when asking humans to make judgments on a question & answer based application. Additionally, given the automated potential for collecting large amounts of data, video game personality assessments may be more accurate than human-graded assessments and less biased. In this study, we explore the potential of video games to predict job performance through personality by using the publicly available Grand Theft Auto V player statistics and qualitative interviews of Grand Theft Auto V players.