Personality Assessment in Ecological Settings by Means of Virtual Reality

Personality has traditionally been assessed by means of questionnaires. Unfortunately, the use of self‐reported measures is vulnerable to a variety of biases related to the self‐judgment and self‐consciousness of the subjects in front of the investigator. To cope with these issues, many psychometric methods have been used to identify and delete possible instances of lying and deceitfulness to eradicate any deceiving biases; however, personality is so “personal” that biases are never easy to statistically control. A possible solution to these problems is to build tests with a higher rate of ecological validity. The ideal situation is to assess behaviors in specific tasks in daily situations. The chapter evaluates the potential of virtual reality (VR) to create prototypical situations that can help researchers to understand personality traits.