PRISM: A Personality-Driven Multi-Agent Framework for Social Media Simulation

Abstract: Traditional agent-based models (ABMs) of opinion dynamics often fail to capture the psychological heterogeneity driving online polarization due to simplistic homogeneity assumptions. This limitation obscures the critical interplay between individual cognitive biases and information propagation, thereby hindering a mechanistic understanding of how ideological divides are amplified. To address this challenge, we introduce the Personality-Refracted Intelligent Simulation Model (PRISM), a hybrid framework coupling stochastic differential equations (SDE) for continuous emotional evolution with a personality-conditional partially observable Markov decision process (PC-POMDP) for discrete decision-making. In contrast to continuous trait approaches, PRISM assigns distinct Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) based cognitive policies to multimodal LLM (MLLM) agents, initialized via data-driven priors from large-scale social media datasets. PRISM achieves superior personality consistency aligned with human ground truth, significantly outperforming standard homogeneous and Big Five benchmarks. This framework effectively replicates emergent phenomena such as rational suppression and affective resonance, offering a robust tool for analyzing complex social media ecosystems.