Have a feeling that if one used something deeper than just lasso regression, much better results could have been obtained. This is very similar to a recommender system, or a text classification problem, and there much better than lasso can be done. The data is sort of open, in principle, btw.

But nevermind what can be predicted from the likes. They say that coworkers have r=0.27, while spouse has r=0.58. This looks like a serious problem with the test more than anything else.

This may be interpreted as "cowokers don't know you (and don't care...)" kind of stuff. But coworkers often have a comparable amount of contact with a person vs spouse. Alternatively, one could also interpret this as there is no "the one true personality", but different personalities in different environments (at least when we define personality as a result of a test). And so coworkers are not wrong, they just see a different picture.

And there might be other possibilities.

In fact, one should try to predict the coworker's (and spuse's, ect...) scores of a person from person's likes, in addition to trying to predict person's own assessment.