This reference is my best attempt to understand the puzzle in that one event you can get if you are in the Skullduggery Focus where a spooky mentor shows up and gives you an espionage voigt-kampff test. You’re obviously supposed to figure out what answer they will like based on their personality traits, but what seem to me to be obvious solutions keep failing the event, thus costing me a sweet sweet intrigue perk.

The CK3 wiki has way less event trees cataloged than other paradox games, and most of the threads that came up on a search were almost entirely vague conjecture, so I decided to look in the event files myself. This isn’t something I usually attempt because I’m not super good at interpreting the scripts. After gathering a lot from the dev comments and following some references through a few different files, I’m fairly confident in about 70% of what I’m laying out here

The character that presents you with this opportunity is called "scope:courtier_spy" in the event script, but I’m mostly going to call them the mentor in this guide.

In the event, the mentor presents you with three hypothetical scenarios and asks you what you would do. For each question you have three answer options selected from a pool of 8 total. Only one of the three answers is correct and will give you progress toward success. You need to answer two out of three questions to get the perk.

I mentioned that each question had a pool of 8 possible answers. These each correspond to a personality archetype. The eight types are Malicious, Benevolent, Dominant, Submissive, Extroverted, Introverted, Emotional, and Levelheaded.

Now at this point, the challenge seems simple: a character with the Generous personality trait is gonna respond to the benevolent answer, and the Brave character with the dominant one, so on and so on, right?...

Wrong.

Even setting aside the edge cases where a character might have something like Generous, Brave, and Humble, making your guesswork a little trickier, you’ll find that most of the time you will be stumped, and shuffled off with your shameful consolation prize: the temporary “Learning to Read People” buff.

That’s because this event uses an additional layer of npc personality abstraction on top of the behind-the-scenes behavior variables that are used in most of the ai decision-making scripts. As far as I can tell, it seems like a bespoke system crafted by the people that wrote a handful of lifestyle events and isn’t used anywhere else in the game. I could be wrong about this though, as I mentioned I am in no way an expert at this.

In a lot of CK3's AI decision-making scripts, the character's choice is influenced by common values like “ai_boldness” and “ai_rationality” that the game calculates based on their Traits, event effects, and other attributes.

This personality system takes a specific few of those values, checks their “threshold score” which only returns a modifier if the character’s Traits contribute enough points to reach a certain level, and then adds that to the weight of one or more archetypes.

The event then semi-randomly rolls through the archetypes and picks three that the character has at least some degree of weight in (positive or negative) and presents the corresponding responses as options.

To follow the chart, identify which three of the eight archetypes you are being offered (see each Scenario below). Check which of those three archetypes your mentor has the highest score, based on their 3-4 personality traits.

The exact amounts these traits confer and the threshold required to make a difference seems to vary highly between the types, and so there’s a level of precision I’m leaving out for the sake of space and simplicity, but the approximate formula would be that for a given archetype to succeed (meaning correspond to the correct option to choose) that archetype needs to have at least three positive traits, two if one of them is in the “large increase” tier, but negative traits cancel these out with “large decrease” tier Traits generally breaking ties (reducing or eliminating the impact on the archetype).

Malicious: Punishment would be the only option.
Benevolent: Everyone makes mistakes; I would forgive the page.
Dominant: They both would have to tell me what happened.
Submissive: I am sure they could handle it better without me.
Extroverted: Encouraging conversation solves most problems.
Introverted: If there's fighting, I would leave as fast as possible.
Emotional: I would join in on the yelling!
Levelheaded: I would ask both of them to present their side of the conflict.

Malicious: Make an example of the spy!
Benevolent: First, I would make sure that the spy is treated well.
Dominant: A spy? No matter. We march on!
Submissive: I'm sure the officer would know what to do.
Extroverted: I would talk to the spy, see what they have to say.
Introverted: I would ask the officer to take care of it and leave me alone.
Emotional: A spy?! We would never— It would never happen!
Levelheaded: Obviously, the spy has some answers to give, in time.

Malicious: Punishment is the only option.
Benevolent: We all have our differences; it wouldn't bother me.
Dominant: No one questions me like that! I would confront the vassal.
Submissive: If my vassal thinks it's a bad decision, then it probably is.
Extroverted: The whole court would hear of the vassal's every mistake.
Introverted: I would try to ignore the slight; no need to make a scene.
Emotional: Well, I would confront them. Loudly.
Levelheaded: A difference in opinion should be solved by discussion.

This event chain triggers with event “intrigue_scheming_special.1001”

The script for the event can be found here:
Crusader Kings III/game/events/lifestyles/intrigue_lifestyle/intrigue_scheming_events.txt

The flavor text is in this file:
[CK3]/game/localization/english/event_localization/lifestyle/guile/intrigue_scheming_events_l_english.yml
(all the display text is kept separately and called by reference in the script, so to read which option corresponds to which trigger you have to flip between the two documents)

I found the process that converts behavior attribute scores to archetype flags in here:
[CK3]/game/common/scripted_effects/00_intrigue_lifestyle_effects.txt

The only reference I could find for how traits contribute to behavior attributes was in this file:
[CK3]/game/common/script_values/00_ai_values.txt

However, the only values contained here that are actually used in the game are the thresholds, I haven’t been able to locate the full list of modifiers, so I’m going off the developer's in-line comments which are highly incomplete and indicate in several places that they may be out of date.

So, simply put, this is a rough approximation of a complicated process, so mileage with these tips may vary.

Images:
https://ck3.paradoxwikis.com/index.php?title=Category:Trait_icons

Big ups to this guy on the pdx forums:
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/intrigue-lifestyle-event-to-put-on-an-act.1425434/post-26933634

His explanation got me started looking, and i suspect he has a better understanding of the files than i do, but following his method never seemed to reliably get success with the event, and i think that’s because the weight of the associated traits has more impact on the strength of the archetype than the number of traits, which makes it difficult to figure out which option has the highest rating

The mentor’s Traits give static bonuses to hidden behavior attributes. If the value hits a certain positive or negative threshold, they influence the weight of one or more of the eight personality archetypes being assigned. The mentor will present three options corresponding to one of the eight archetypes. The correct answer is the archetype of the highest weight. Look on the chart to see what your mentor likes. Green good, red bad. (I couldn't get the color coded version to format correctly in Steam)
I only included traits on the chart that I was able to firmly verify their effect in the event files - the dev comments make it clear that there are many other factors like education/lifestyle progress that are also present in the calculation, so relying on some intuition might get you farther than just the chart, but remember that all three of the options given may be present in your mentor, but you need to estimate which is the strongest.

Thanks for reading