A study published in the journal F1000Research in 2023 suggests that specific personality traits, particularly honesty and agreeableness, can predict how confident young adults feel in their ability to spot deepfake videos. The findings provide evidence that our underlying psychological makeup shapes our perceived vulnerability to sophisticated artificial intelligence deception.
Deepfake technology relies on artificial intelligence to create highly realistic, manipulated videos or audio recordings of real people. These programs study thousands of images or voice clips to generate synthetic media depicting people saying or doing things that never actually happened. As these digital forgeries become harder to distinguish from reality, they pose a growing threat to personal privacy and accurate information.
Scientists wanted to understand why some individuals feel more capable of recognizing these digital forgeries than others. A person's belief in their own capability to succeed in a specific situation is known in psychology as self-efficacy. Past research indicates that self-efficacy is often heavily influenced by fundamental personality traits.
For their study, the scientists focused on the HEXACO model of human personality. This framework categorizes human personality into six broad dimensions: honesty-humility, emotionality, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness to experience.
The researchers recruited 200 young adults to participate in an online survey. The sample included 139 women and 61 men, all between the ages of 18 and 25. This specific age group was selected because young adults are highly active online and frequently encounter digital media.
Participants completed a standardized questionnaire to measure their six HEXACO personality traits. They also answered a custom questionnaire designed to assess their specific self-efficacy in recognizing manipulated media, rating how capable they felt at spotting abnormal eye movements, mismatched skin tones, or awkward facial expressions that did not match the emotion being spoken.
The statistical analysis revealed that only two of the six personality traits significantly predicted a person's confidence in detecting deepfakes. Honesty-humility and agreeableness showed strong but opposing relationships with deepfake detection self-efficacy.
People who scored high in honesty-humility tended to report lower confidence in their ability to spot deepfakes. This personality trait involves a reluctance to manipulate others and a general lack of interest in breaking rules. The researchers suggest that individuals with high honesty-humility might be less accepting of manipulative technologies in general. As a result, they may feel overwhelmed by the highly deceptive nature of deepfakes and doubt their own capacity to identify them.
In contrast, individuals who scored high in agreeableness reported higher confidence in their ability to detect artificial intelligence manipulations. Agreeableness reflects a person's tendency to be cooperative, trusting, and willing to compromise with others. The scientists propose that agreeable people might have more faith in collective intelligence and shared forensic tools. This cooperative mindset tends to boost their confidence in using community resources or the wisdom of the crowd to navigate digital spaces safely.
The other four personality traits did not significantly predict self-efficacy. Emotionality, extraversion, conscientiousness, and openness to experience showed no clear impact on how confident participants felt. It was notable that traits often associated with individual achievement, such as conscientiousness and openness, did not significantly predict a person's confidence in recognizing deepfakes. This suggests that the problem is not simply a lack of individual effort or intelligence, but something tied to how unevenly matched ordinary people are against increasingly sophisticated deception technology.
The statistical analysis also showed no significant difference in self-efficacy between men and women. Both genders reported similar levels of overall confidence in their ability to recognize manipulated digital media.
While these findings offer an insightful look into digital psychology, there are a few limitations to keep in mind. The most significant limitation is that the study measured subjective confidence, not actual accuracy in spotting deepfakes. People often overestimate their own skills, a psychological phenomenon known as the Dunning-Kruger effect. It is entirely possible that individuals who feel highly confident in their detection abilities might actually perform poorly when tested with real deepfake videos.
Future research should involve testing participants with actual deepfake media to compare their perceived confidence against their real-world accuracy. The researchers also recommend using randomized sampling methods to confirm whether these personality traits directly cause changes in digital media awareness. Taken together, the findings suggest that confidence alone is an unreliable shield against deepfakes, and that building genuine resilience to digital deception may depend less on individual personality and more on shared tools, education, and collective digital literacy.