A method and apparatus for a clinical simulation system targets psychological phenomena that can negatively impact the decision making of both a clinician and a patient. Techniques include identifying an independently reasoning agent in a medical clinical information processing system configured to simulate interactions between a clinician and a patient. The method also includes determining, on the system, psychological profile data that indicates one or more personality traits for the agent. The method further includes storing psychological profile data on the system in a hierarchical data structure for a natural language processing system. The method still further includes determining simulation output from the system based at least in part on the psychological profile data.