Open Models, Closed Minds? compares how twelve weight-accessible language models answer personality questionnaires with no conditioning, an explicit target personality, and a target personality plus profession. It is a nine-page AAAI 2025 paper with a 39-page arXiv v3 extended version. Its observable is not an internal psychological personality: it is a set of generated questionnaire choices after self-referential instructions. For RQ0, each model describes 16 MBTI-labelled types and five BFI factors at temperature 0.01; descriptions are compared with references using word overlap and `all-mpnet-base-v2` cosine similarity. Means of 0.67 and 0.66 are interpreted as awareness, but there is no validated threshold, null control, human comparison, or contamination test. The task may simply reproduce public definitions. For RQ1, 60 items copied from 16Personalities and the 44 BFI items are presented separately in randomized order. Thirty repetitions are run at temperatures 0.01 and 0.7. At low temperature, most models collapse to one result, with ENFJ and Judging dominant. Raising temperature diversifies some models but does not show a latent personality emerging. On BFI, nearly all factors are high except Neuroticism and temperature effects are heterogeneous. For RQ2, the system prompt describes one of 16 types or requests a maximal level of one BFI factor. In four-letter classification, SOLAR has mean accuracy 0.785/0.744 at temperature 0.01/0.7; Dolphin 0.654/0.633; NeuralChat 0.577/0.498; and Llama-3-8B 0.517/0.479. Mixtral and Mistral remain near 0.06, while Vicuna, Llama-2-7B, Falcon, Gemma, and Phi-3 also show limited adaptation. This is the strongest result: compliance with this steering procedure varies sharply across checkpoints and usually worsens at higher temperature. For BFI, the paper reports percentage increase in the target factor over baseline; Neuroticism reaches +233.3% for Llama-3-8B. However, only the high pole is conditioned, off-target factor changes are not reported, and a large percentage can originate from a low baseline. Selective control of a Big Five profile is therefore not established. RQ3 adds three professions considered representative of each target. Matching sometimes improves, especially for already responsive models; ENFJ paired with teacher is easiest. The design has no role-only, mismatched-role, random-role, or factorial incremental-effect condition. The profession repeats stereotypical target information, so an independent role mechanism cannot be isolated. The mapping provenance is also not auditable: the text says a group of psychologists selected roles but supplies no count, credentials, agreement, or adjudication, while the appendix displays role categorization in prompt-like form. A major construct error concerns the categorical instrument. The 60 items and web scoring come from 16Personalities, whose official documentation identifies its assessment as NERIS Type Explorer, with five spectrums and explicit differences from Myers-Briggs. The paper calls it MBTI, omits Assertive/Turbulent, and generalizes results as though they came from the genuine instrument. The response-to-type transformation is opaque and unreleased. Reproducibility also falls short of the paper's promise. The appendices disclose prompts, items, BFI key, model labels, and detailed tables, which is a genuine strength, but raw responses, per-run scores, seeds, orders, errors, code, environment, and immutable revisions are absent. AAAI, arXiv, and the author's current publication page do not link a repository, and exact title/ID searches on GitHub find bibliographic lists only. Model names omit organizations and commits; Dolphin is 2.1 in Table 2 but Appendix I links 2.2.1. Generation parameters are internally wrong or ambiguous: `top_p=50` and `top_k=1` are reported, reversing standard defaults of `top_k=50` and `top_p=1.0`. RQ3 adds three roles, yet the stated totals of 11,520 MBTI and 3,600 BFI tests do not multiply by three; Table 7 uses tenths consistent with ten repetitions per role while the method says N=30. The exact denominator cannot be recovered. Finally, the analysis is predominantly descriptive: no intervals, model contrasts, multiplicity strategy, preregistration, power analysis, or equivalence tests are supplied. The faithful conclusion is narrower than the title: these checkpoints show different questionnaire response styles and different compliance with explicit personality steering. Many resist this prompt and four adapt better. The study does not establish intrinsic personality, psychological closed-mindedness, or a footprint identity. Open scoring, raw outputs, fixed versions, seeds, convergent and behavioral psychometrics, spillover controls, retest, role ablations, and human/anti-stereotype validation are needed.
Research question
What response patterns do twelve accessible-weight LLMs produce on a 16Personalities questionnaire and on the BFI, how much do they change when congruent types/factors and professions are imposed on them, and does that obedience differ across models and temperatures?