The Ultimate Tutorial for AI-driven Scale Development in Generative Psychometrics: Releasing AIGENIE from its Bottle

Self-report questionnaires remain the prevailing tool for probing the psychological states of persona-conditioned agents (PC-Agents). However, classical instruments inherit two well-known threats: contamination from training corpora and directional bias driven by social-desirability or contextual framing. To overcome these methodological bottlenecks, we ask whether projective paradigms can be adapted into a robust psychometric tool. We introduce \textbf{GenPT} (Generative Projective Testing), which reformulates TAT, Rorschach, and SCT with newly generated stimuli and organizes assessment as a three-stage pipeline to derive standardized psychological indicators and target states. Evaluating PC-Agents induced via CharacterRAG and AnnaAgent profiles, we benchmark GenPT's reliability and validity against classical questionnaires. The results indicate that questionnaires exhibit systematic directional shifts under social-desirability framing, most strongly on suicide ideation. In contrast, GenPT's collected behavioral patterns stay near the symmetric baseline. Furthermore, under a longitudinal counselling context, GenPT-based depression assessment shifts by roughly an order of magnitude more than the questionnaire counterpart when Qwen3 serves as the backbone. Overall, GenPT complements self-report methods in scenarios where contamination resistance, bias asymmetry, and context sensitivity matter. Code and stimuli can be found at https://github.com/sci-m-wang/GenPT.

Personality assessment through situational judgment tests (SJTs) offers unique advantages over traditional Likert-type self-report scales, yet their development remains labor-intensive, time-consuming, and heavily dependent on subject matter experts. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have shown promise for automatic item generation (AIG). Building on these developments, the present study focuses on developing and evaluating a structured and generalizable framework for automatically generating personality SJTs, using GPT-4 and ChatGPT-5 as empirical examples. Three studies were conducted. Study 1 systematically compared the effects of prompt design and temperature settings on the content validity of LLM-generated items to develop an effective and stable LLM-based AIG approach for personality SJT. Results showed that optimized prompts and a temperature of 1.0 achieved the best balance of creativity and accuracy on GPT-4. Study 2 examined the cross-model generalizability and reproducibility of this automated SJT generation approach through multiple rounds. The results showed that the approach consistently produced reproducible and high-quality items on ChatGPT-5. Study 3 evaluated the psychometric properties of LLM-generated SJTs covering five facets of the Big Five personality traits. Results demonstrated satisfactory reliability and validity across most facets, though limitations were observed in the convergent validity of the compliance facet and certain aspects of criterion-related validity. These findings provide robust evidence that the proposed LLM-based AIG approach can produce culturally appropriate and psychometrically sound SJTs with efficiency comparable to or exceeding traditional methods.

Cognitive decision-making research depends on diverse scenarios with carefully controlled complexity, yet manual production is slow, inconsistent, and biased. We developed an automated pipeline that uses LLms to generate structured decision scenarios and validates their complexity through a composite framework rooted in established task-complexity theory. We evaluated 4,238 scenarios across multiple domains and complexity tiers. Measurement validation met rigorous psychometric standards. Agreement among five independent model families was nearly perfect, with an intraclass correlation coefficient of 0.997 and a kappa of 0.971. Known-groups validity demonstrated large separation between tiers, with an eta-squared of 0.587 and all pairwise comparisons significant at p less than .001. Factor analysis revealed a dominant complexity construct, with loadings between 0.87 and 0.96 across three frameworks, while interactivity formed a weaker secondary dimension at 0.34. Discriminant validity was limited by a strong relationship between complexity and text length that persisted after controlling for tier, yielding a partial correlation of 0.86. This constrains construct purity but does not undermine the instrument's tier-grading function. Model analyses showed a negative association between throughput and schema pass rate (r = -0.967, p = .007, n = 5), suggesting a speed-quality trade-off, though largely driven by one high-throughput model. Llama 4 Maverick generated scenarios fastest at 134 per minute versus 25 for DeepSeek Chat V3.2, but underproduced complex-tier scenarios, whereas DeepSeek Chat V3.2 balanced domain coverage with high schema compliance. The system demonstrated strong psychometric properties, enabling reliable classification into Simple, Moderate, and Complex tiers and providing the measurement infrastructure needed for downstream cognitive assessment of AI systems