The study investigates how different prompt components affect language model responses in psychometric tests. By crossing five distinct baseline personas with five variants of each prompt element—persona wording, task instruction, item wording, and option symbol—the authors measure response shifts using the 1‑Wasserstein distance. Their analysis of 13 small open‑weight language models on the Big Five Inventory and Short Dark Triad reveals that task instruction and option symbol changes often cause more variation than paraphrasing the persona or item, with prompt artifacts explaining over 50% of the variation for many items.
arXiv:2606. 03357v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When prompting SLMs for psychometric assessments, researchers assume the outputs reflect semantic reasoning.
arXiv:2603.04419v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-language models produce different object and use descriptions under different persona prompts, but low overlap alone does not identify...
arXiv:2608.22438v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Persona-conditioned large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to simulate survey responses across diverse domains. However, apparent response...
arXiv:2606. 20205v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Psychological instruments designed for humans are increasingly used to assign large language models (LLMs) stable psychological profiles that affect their usability, safety assessment, and use as proxies for human participants in research.
arXiv:2606. 05486v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Prompt ambiguity is a common source of failure in large language models, but is difficult to localize because it is a latent property of the prompt, while existing attribution methods are designed to explain observable outputs such as logits or generated tokens.
The paper investigates how persona prompting—using short textual descriptions of individuals—to align large language models (LLMs) with human survey responses. It examines the impact of selecting different persona attributes and finds that not all attribute combinations improve performance, suggesting that the variation in human responses to survey questions may explain mixed results. The study evaluates multiple attribute selection methods across four social surveys, two countries, six LLMs, and twenty prediction tasks, offering guidance on when persona prompting is beneficial and which attribute choices are most effective.
arXiv:2610.03998v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as synthetic personas representing survey respondents. Their validity as substitutes for particu...
The paper investigates how the language of prompts and responses affects large language model (LLM) outputs. Using five models and 68 non‑translation questions, the authors compare English‑to‑English, English‑to‑Norwegian, Norwegian‑to‑Norwegian, and Norwegian‑to‑English conditions, yielding 1,348 responses after filtering. They find that prompt language strongly influences response length—Norwegian prompts shorten English outputs by ~37 % and English prompts shorten Norwegian outputs by ~41 %—while semantic similarity remains high across conditions.
arXiv:2608. 10385v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as relevance assessors in information retrieval (IR) evaluation, raising questions about how assessor framing affects judgment reliability and downstream system comparison.
arXiv:2609.38448v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Open-ended LLM homogeneity can create false plurality when several systems appear to offer independent perspectives while returning the same familiar d...
arXiv:2510. 22170v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Persona conditioning is widely used to steer large language model (LLM) behavior, but it is unclear whether it induces stable behavioral structure or superficial variation.
arXiv:2609.39882v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pre-training equips large language models (LLMs) with a broad repertoire of behavioral patterns associated with roles, styles, values, and goals. Post-...