Big Five personality and technology acceptance: can you trust a model that fits the data? With Ho Hwi Chie, an engineer who left the top of the car industry to study why people accept a technology and keep using it.
Classic technology acceptance models describe one route for everybody. This study measured the Big Five personality traits, intention to use, social support and user experience in 584 users of urban trains, and tested the whole chain with structural equation modeling (SEM). The result: there is not one door, but several. Agreeableness, conscientiousness and neuroticism come in through the intention to use; openness through social support; extraversion through the experience itself. And the strongest link in the model is not about the technology: it goes from wanting to use the system to the help you get from other people.
I talk with Dr. Ho Hwi Chie (Brigita), Associate Professor of Industrial Engineering at BINUS University and first author of the study, published in 2026 in the International Journal of Technology. Before research she was CEO of Audi and Volkswagen Caravelle in Indonesia. The data come from public transport users in the Jakarta area, but the questions are for anyone who works with surveys and statistical models.
In this episode:
- How an industrial engineer ends up measuring personality and social support.
- Why study whether people accept a train, and not only how many people it can carry.
- Several doors into technology acceptance, and why the idea is not to label people.
- Social support as a resource: Conservation of Resources theory and four kinds of help.
- 184 questions, 584 valid answers: the fieldwork and the most nervous moment of the project.
- Can you trust a model that fits? Why a good fit is where the next questions begin.
- A young sample and one single moment in time: what this study can and cannot say.
- Rigorous or just stubborn: when to change a model, and when not to.
- AI for non-native English speakers, and advice for engineers who want to work with human data.
Recorded asynchronously: Brigita recorded her answers, and I recorded my questions separately.
Guest:
Ho Hwi Chie (Brigita), BINUS University
Email: hhchie@binus.edu
Email: hwichieho@hotmail.com
Scopus: https://www.scopus.com/authid/detail.uri?authorId=56154321100
Read the paper (open access): Distinct Pathways of Personality Traits in Technology Acceptance: The Mediating Role of Social Support and User Experience in Rail Public Transport (International Journal of Technology, 2026): https://doi.org/10.14716/ijtech.v17i3.8309
Chapters:
00:00 Intro: the same train, several doors
04:21 From the car industry to research
08:28 Public transport as a human problem
12:56 Several doors into technology acceptance
16:53 Social support and Conservation of Resources
22:06 The fieldwork and a model that had to fit
26:51 The hard questions: young sample, one moment in time
32:16 Rigorous or just stubborn? Teamwork, a normal week and AI
37:57 What she enjoys most and least, and her advice
42:39 Outro: four ideas to take away
More: https://horacio-ps.com/en/principal-english
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