{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,7,4]],"date-time":"2026-07-04T07:22:36Z","timestamp":1783149756582,"version":"3.54.6"},"reference-count":55,"publisher":"Elsevier BV","issue":"8","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2026,12,1]],"date-time":"2026-12-01T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1796083200000},"content-version":"tdm","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/www.elsevier.com\/tdm\/userlicense\/1.0\/"},{"start":{"date-parts":[[2026,12,1]],"date-time":"2026-12-01T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1796083200000},"content-version":"tdm","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/www.elsevier.com\/legal\/tdmrep-license"},{"start":{"date-parts":[[2026,12,1]],"date-time":"2026-12-01T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1796083200000},"content-version":"stm-asf","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.15223\/policy-017"},{"start":{"date-parts":[[2026,12,1]],"date-time":"2026-12-01T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1796083200000},"content-version":"stm-asf","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.15223\/policy-037"},{"start":{"date-parts":[[2026,12,1]],"date-time":"2026-12-01T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1796083200000},"content-version":"stm-asf","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.15223\/policy-012"},{"start":{"date-parts":[[2026,12,1]],"date-time":"2026-12-01T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1796083200000},"content-version":"stm-asf","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.15223\/policy-029"},{"start":{"date-parts":[[2026,12,1]],"date-time":"2026-12-01T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1796083200000},"content-version":"stm-asf","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.15223\/policy-004"}],"funder":[{"DOI":"10.13039\/501100001809","name":"National Natural Science Foundation of China","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","award":["62577022"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["62577022"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/501100001809","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"publisher"}]},{"DOI":"10.13039\/501100001809","name":"National Natural Science Foundation of China","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","award":["62477010"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["62477010"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/501100001809","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"publisher"}]},{"DOI":"10.13039\/501100001809","name":"National Natural Science Foundation of China","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","award":["62307028"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["62307028"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/501100001809","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"publisher"}]},{"DOI":"10.13039\/501100003399","name":"Shanghai Municipality Science and Technology Commission","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","id":[{"id":"10.13039\/501100003399","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"publisher"}]},{"DOI":"10.13039\/501100018625","name":"Science and Technology Innovation Plan Of Shanghai Science and Technology Commission","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","award":["NCMHC-ECNU-MHDGI-202510"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["NCMHC-ECNU-MHDGI-202510"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/501100018625","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"publisher"}]},{"DOI":"10.13039\/501100018625","name":"Science and Technology Innovation Plan Of Shanghai Science and Technology Commission","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","award":["24YF2710100"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["24YF2710100"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/501100018625","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"publisher"}]}],"content-domain":{"domain":["elsevier.com","sciencedirect.com"],"crossmark-restriction":true},"short-container-title":["Information Processing & Management"],"published-print":{"date-parts":[[2026,12]]},"DOI":"10.1016\/j.ipm.2026.104962","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2026,6,9]],"date-time":"2026-06-09T20:24:31Z","timestamp":1781036671000},"page":"104962","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1016\/elsevier_cm_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["A mechanistic interpretability perspective on personality in large language models"],"prefix":"10.1016","volume":"63","author":[{"given":"Yuhao","family":"Dan","sequence":"first","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Lang","family":"Yu","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-6988-7568","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Jiaju","family":"Lin","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-5602-1877","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Qin","family":"Chen","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Jie","family":"Zhou","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Junfeng","family":"Tian","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-9307-3548","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Qingchun","family":"Bai","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-4723-5486","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Liang","family":"He","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"78","reference":[{"issue":"11","key":"10.1016\/j.ipm.2026.104962_b1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","DOI":"10.1371\/journal.pone.0027633","article-title":"Personality is reflected in the brain\u2019s intrinsic functional architecture","volume":"6","author":"Adelstein","year":"2011","journal-title":"PloS One"},{"key":"10.1016\/j.ipm.2026.104962_b2","series-title":"Circuit tracing: Revealing computational graphs in language models","author":"Ameisen","year":"2025"},{"key":"10.1016\/j.ipm.2026.104962_b3","series-title":"Sparks of artificial general intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4","author":"Bubeck","year":"2023"},{"key":"10.1016\/j.ipm.2026.104962_b4","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"16318","DOI":"10.52202\/075280-0719","article-title":"Towards automated circuit discovery for mechanistic interpretability","volume":"36","author":"Conmy","year":"2023","journal-title":"Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems"},{"issue":"1","key":"10.1016\/j.ipm.2026.104962_b5","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"110","DOI":"10.1111\/j.1468-2389.2007.00371.x","article-title":"The convergent validity between self and observer ratings of personality: A meta-analytic review","volume":"15","author":"Connolly","year":"2007","journal-title":"International Journal of Selection and Assessment"},{"key":"10.1016\/j.ipm.2026.104962_b6","article-title":"A five-factor theory of personality","volume":"Vol. 2","author":"Costa","year":"1999"},{"issue":"2","key":"10.1016\/j.ipm.2026.104962_b7","first-page":"179","article-title":"The revised neo personality inventory (NEO-PI-R)","volume":"2","author":"Costa","year":"2008","journal-title":"The SAGE Handbook of Personality Theory and Assessment"},{"issue":"6","key":"10.1016\/j.ipm.2026.104962_b8","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"820","DOI":"10.1177\/0956797610370159","article-title":"Testing predictions from personality neuroscience: Brain structure and the big five","volume":"21","author":"DeYoung","year":"2010","journal-title":"Psychological Science"},{"issue":"1756","key":"10.1016\/j.ipm.2026.104962_b9","article-title":"A distributed brain network predicts general intelligence from resting-state human neuroimaging data","volume":"373","author":"Dubois","year":"2018","journal-title":"Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Series B (Biological Sciences)"},{"key":"10.1016\/j.ipm.2026.104962_b10","series-title":"Privileged bases in the transformer residual stream","author":"Elhage","year":"2023"},{"key":"10.1016\/j.ipm.2026.104962_b11","series-title":"Measuring the mixing of contextual information in the transformer","author":"Ferrando","year":"2022"},{"key":"10.1016\/j.ipm.2026.104962_b12","series-title":"Explaining how transformers use context to build predictions","author":"Ferrando","year":"2023"},{"key":"10.1016\/j.ipm.2026.104962_b13","series-title":"LLM agents in interaction: Measuring personality consistency and linguistic alignment in interacting populations of large language models","author":"Frisch","year":"2024"},{"key":"10.1016\/j.ipm.2026.104962_b14","series-title":"Handbook of personality psychology","first-page":"617","article-title":"Congruence of others\u2019 and self-judgments of personality","author":"Funder","year":"1997"},{"key":"10.1016\/j.ipm.2026.104962_b15","series-title":"Dissecting recall of factual associations in auto-regressive language models","author":"Geva","year":"2023"},{"key":"10.1016\/j.ipm.2026.104962_b16","series-title":"Personality and personality disorders","first-page":"34","article-title":"An alternative \u201cdescription of personality\u201d: The Big-Five factor structure","author":"Goldberg","year":"2013"},{"key":"10.1016\/j.ipm.2026.104962_b17","unstructured":"Hanna, M., Pezzelle, S., & Belinkov, Y. (2024). Have Faith in Faithfulness: Going Beyond Circuit Overlap When Finding Model Mechanisms. In Proceedings of the first conference on language modeling (COLM)."},{"key":"10.1016\/j.ipm.2026.104962_b18","series-title":"Revisiting the reliability of psychological scales on large language models","author":"Huang","year":"2023"},{"key":"10.1016\/j.ipm.2026.104962_b19","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"10622","DOI":"10.52202\/075280-0466","article-title":"Evaluating and inducing personality in pre-trained language models","volume":"36","author":"Jiang","year":"2023","journal-title":"Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems"},{"key":"10.1016\/j.ipm.2026.104962_b20","series-title":"PersonaLLM: Investigating the ability of large language models to express personality traits","author":"Jiang","year":"2023"},{"key":"10.1016\/j.ipm.2026.104962_b21","article-title":"Big five inventory","author":"John","year":"1991","journal-title":"Journal of Personality and Social Psychology"},{"key":"10.1016\/j.ipm.2026.104962_b22","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"78","DOI":"10.1016\/j.jrp.2014.05.003","article-title":"Measuring thirty facets of the Five Factor Model with a 120-item public domain inventory: Development of the IPIP-NEO-120","volume":"51","author":"Johnson","year":"2014","journal-title":"Journal of Research in Personality"},{"key":"10.1016\/j.ipm.2026.104962_b23","series-title":"Estimating the personality of white-box language models","author":"Karra","year":"2022"},{"issue":"6","key":"10.1016\/j.ipm.2026.104962_b24","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"2533","DOI":"10.1093\/cercor\/bhy123","article-title":"Spatial topography of individual-specific cortical networks predicts human cognition, personality, and emotion","volume":"29","author":"Kong","year":"2019","journal-title":"Cerebral Cortex"},{"issue":"1","key":"10.1016\/j.ipm.2026.104962_b25","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"159","DOI":"10.2307\/2529310","article-title":"The measurement of observer agreement for categorical data","volume":"33","author":"Landis","year":"1977","journal-title":"Biometrics"},{"issue":"2","key":"10.1016\/j.ipm.2026.104962_b26","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"329","DOI":"10.1207\/s15327906mbr3902_8","article-title":"Psychometric properties of the HEXACO personality inventory","volume":"39","author":"Lee","year":"2004","journal-title":"Multivariate Behavioral Research"},{"issue":"6","key":"10.1016\/j.ipm.2026.104962_b27","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"493","DOI":"10.1016\/S0960-9822(03)00135-0","article-title":"The cost of cortical computation","volume":"13","author":"Lennie","year":"2003","journal-title":"Current Biology"},{"key":"10.1016\/j.ipm.2026.104962_b28","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Li, W., Liu, J., Liu, A., Zhou, X., Diab, M., & Sap, M. (2025). Big5-chat: Shaping LLM personalities through training on human-grounded data. In Proceedings of the 63rd annual meeting of the association for computational linguistics (volume 1: long papers) (pp. 20434\u201320471).","DOI":"10.18653\/v1\/2025.acl-long.999"},{"key":"10.1016\/j.ipm.2026.104962_b29","article-title":"How do large language models understand relevance? a mechanistic interpretability perspective","author":"Liu","year":"2025","journal-title":"ACM Transactions on Information Systems"},{"issue":"2","key":"10.1016\/j.ipm.2026.104962_b30","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"179","DOI":"10.1016\/S0092-6566(03)00056-4","article-title":"Consensual validation of personality traits across cultures","volume":"38","author":"McCrae","year":"2004","journal-title":"Journal of Research in Personality"},{"issue":"3","key":"10.1016\/j.ipm.2026.104962_b31","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"407","DOI":"10.1037\/0022-3514.89.3.407","article-title":"Personality profiles of cultures: aggregate personality traits","volume":"89","author":"McCrae","year":"2005","journal-title":"Journal of Personality and Social Psychology"},{"key":"10.1016\/j.ipm.2026.104962_b32","series-title":"Causal head gating: A framework for interpreting roles of attention heads in transformers","author":"Nam","year":"2025"},{"issue":"6583","key":"10.1016\/j.ipm.2026.104962_b33","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"607","DOI":"10.1038\/381607a0","article-title":"Emergence of simple-cell receptive field properties by learning a sparse code for natural images","volume":"381","author":"Olshausen","year":"1996","journal-title":"Nature"},{"key":"10.1016\/j.ipm.2026.104962_b34","series-title":"In-context learning and induction heads","author":"Olsson","year":"2022"},{"key":"10.1016\/j.ipm.2026.104962_b35","series-title":"Identifying cooperative personalities in multi-agent contexts through personality steering with representation engineering","author":"Ong","year":"2025"},{"key":"10.1016\/j.ipm.2026.104962_b36","series-title":"Competition of mechanisms: Tracing how language models handle facts and counterfactuals","author":"Ortu","year":"2024"},{"issue":"6","key":"10.1016\/j.ipm.2026.104962_b37","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"556","DOI":"10.1016\/S0092-6566(02)00505-6","article-title":"The dark triad of personality: Narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy","volume":"36","author":"Paulhus","year":"2002","journal-title":"Journal of Research in Personality"},{"issue":"5","key":"10.1016\/j.ipm.2026.104962_b38","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"808","DOI":"10.1177\/17456916231214460","article-title":"Ai psychometrics: Assessing the psychological profiles of large language models through psychometric inventories","volume":"19","author":"Pellert","year":"2024","journal-title":"Perspectives on Psychological Science"},{"key":"10.1016\/j.ipm.2026.104962_b39","series-title":"Linguistic inquiry and word count: LIWC 2001","author":"Pennebaker","year":"2001"},{"key":"10.1016\/j.ipm.2026.104962_b40","series-title":"Activation steering via generative causal mediation","author":"Sankaranarayanan","year":"2026"},{"issue":"2","key":"10.1016\/j.ipm.2026.104962_b41","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"173","DOI":"10.1177\/0022022106297299","article-title":"The geographic distribution of Big Five personality traits: Patterns and profiles of human self-description across 56 nations","volume":"38","author":"Schmitt","year":"2007","journal-title":"Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology"},{"key":"10.1016\/j.ipm.2026.104962_b42","series-title":"Personality traits in large language models","author":"Serapio-Garc\u00eda","year":"2025"},{"key":"10.1016\/j.ipm.2026.104962_b43","series-title":"Opening the black box of deep neural networks via information","author":"Shwartz-Ziv","year":"2017"},{"key":"10.1016\/j.ipm.2026.104962_b44","series-title":"LLMs simulate big five personality traits: Further evidence","author":"Sorokovikova","year":"2024"},{"key":"10.1016\/j.ipm.2026.104962_b45","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Sun, S., Baek, S. Y., & Kim, J. H. (2025). Personality Vector: Modulating Personality of Large Language Models by Model Merging. In Proceedings of the 2025 conference on empirical methods in natural language processing (pp. 24667\u201324688).","DOI":"10.18653\/v1\/2025.emnlp-main.1253"},{"key":"10.1016\/j.ipm.2026.104962_b46","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Syed, A., Rager, C., & Conmy, A. (2024). Attribution patching outperforms automated circuit discovery. In Proceedings of the 7th blackboxNLP workshop: analyzing and interpreting neural networks for NLP (pp. 407\u2013416).","DOI":"10.18653\/v1\/2024.blackboxnlp-1.25"},{"key":"10.1016\/j.ipm.2026.104962_b47","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","DOI":"10.1017\/pen.2017.2","article-title":"Functional connectome of the five-factor model of personality","volume":"1","author":"Toschi","year":"2018","journal-title":"Personality Neuroscience"},{"key":"10.1016\/j.ipm.2026.104962_b48","article-title":"Attention is all you need","volume":"30","author":"Vaswani","year":"2017","journal-title":"Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems"},{"key":"10.1016\/j.ipm.2026.104962_b49","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Wang, S., Li, R., Chen, X., Yuan, Y., Yang, M., & Wong, D. F. (2025). Exploring the Impact of Personality Traits on LLM Toxicity and Bias. In Proceedings of the 2025 conference on empirical methods in natural language processing (pp. 4125\u20134143).","DOI":"10.18653\/v1\/2025.emnlp-main.206"},{"key":"10.1016\/j.ipm.2026.104962_b50","series-title":"Interpretability in the wild: a circuit for indirect object identification in GPT-2 small","author":"Wang","year":"2022"},{"issue":"1","key":"10.1016\/j.ipm.2026.104962_b51","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"519","DOI":"10.1038\/s41598-024-84109-5","article-title":"Evaluating the ability of large language models to emulate personality","volume":"15","author":"Wang","year":"2025","journal-title":"Scientific Reports"},{"key":"10.1016\/j.ipm.2026.104962_b52","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"24824","DOI":"10.52202\/068431-1800","article-title":"Chain-of-thought prompting elicits reasoning in large language models","volume":"35","author":"Wei","year":"2022","journal-title":"Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems"},{"key":"10.1016\/j.ipm.2026.104962_b53","series-title":"Knowledge circuits in pretrained transformers","author":"Yao","year":"2024"},{"key":"10.1016\/j.ipm.2026.104962_b54","series-title":"Advances in neural information processing systems","article-title":"EAP-GP: Mitigating saturation effect in gradient-based automated circuit identification","author":"Zhang","year":"2025"},{"key":"10.1016\/j.ipm.2026.104962_b55","series-title":"A survey of large language models","author":"Zhao","year":"2023"}],"container-title":["Information Processing & Management"],"original-title":[],"language":"en","link":[{"URL":"https:\/\/api.elsevier.com\/content\/article\/PII:S0306457326003535?httpAccept=text\/xml","content-type":"text\/xml","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"text-mining"},{"URL":"https:\/\/api.elsevier.com\/content\/article\/PII:S0306457326003535?httpAccept=text\/plain","content-type":"text\/plain","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"text-mining"}],"deposited":{"date-parts":[[2026,7,4]],"date-time":"2026-07-04T07:10:04Z","timestamp":1783149004000},"score":1,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"https:\/\/linkinghub.elsevier.com\/retrieve\/pii\/S0306457326003535"}},"subtitle":[],"short-title":[],"issued":{"date-parts":[[2026,12]]},"references-count":55,"journal-issue":{"issue":"8","published-print":{"date-parts":[[2026,12]]}},"alternative-id":["S0306457326003535"],"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1016\/j.ipm.2026.104962","relation":{},"ISSN":["0306-4573"],"issn-type":[{"value":"0306-4573","type":"print"}],"subject":[],"published":{"date-parts":[[2026,12]]},"assertion":[{"value":"Elsevier","name":"publisher","label":"This article is maintained by"},{"value":"A mechanistic interpretability perspective on personality in large language models","name":"articletitle","label":"Article Title"},{"value":"Information Processing & Management","name":"journaltitle","label":"Journal Title"},{"value":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1016\/j.ipm.2026.104962","name":"articlelink","label":"CrossRef DOI link to publisher maintained version"},{"value":"article","name":"content_type","label":"Content Type"},{"value":"\u00a9 2026 Elsevier Ltd. All rights are reserved, including those for text and data mining, AI training, and similar technologies.","name":"copyright","label":"Copyright"}],"article-number":"104962"}}