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.
By Nils Schwager, Christoph Hau, Simon M\"unker, Achim Rettinger
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.
By Jelena Meyer, David Garcia, Dirk U. Wulff
arXiv:2608. 13329v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A model that behaves differently when it senses it is being tested would undermine the evaluations we rely on, so recent work has sought to read that sense directly from a model's activations.
By Valentin No\"el
arXiv:2609.22119v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Evaluation awareness poses an unprecedented threat to model evaluation, but the mechanisms by which models detect it remain unknown. This study focus...
By Navraj Singh, Maheep Chaudhary
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...
By Ben Wigler, Maria Tsfasman
arXiv:2607. 13162v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: What a language model will and will not do is largely set during post-training, but which behaviors it expresses, hides, or resists is not revealed by prompting alone.
By Winston Zeng, Ali Emami, Jinho Choi
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...
By Murad Farzulla
arXiv:2507. 04491v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are rapidly being integrated into psychological and behavioral research as research tools, evaluation targets, human simulators, and cognitive models.
By Zhicheng Lin
arXiv:2608.29464v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Chain-of-thought (CoT) monitoring assumes that reasoning traces faithfully record the information that shapes a model's answer. Existing faithfulness...
By Aryo Pradipta Gema, Neel Rajani, Rohit Saxena, Wai-Chung Kwan, Pasquale Minervini
arXiv:2605. 30036v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate a remarkable capacity to adopt different personas and roles; however, it remains unclear whether they can manifest behavior that adheres to a coherent, human-like value structure.
By Asaf Yehudai, Naama Rozen, Ariel Gera
The paper investigates whether human psychometric questionnaires can reliably characterize large language models (LLMs) in everyday interactions. By comparing eight open‑source LLMs’ value and personality profiles from Likert self‑reports (PVQ‑40/21 and BFI‑44/10) with generation probabilities on value‑laden user queries, the authors find substantial divergence between the two methods. The study shows that questionnaire items contain explicit lexical cues that lead models to respond in socially desirable ways, whereas realistic user queries lack such cues, and demographic persona prompts shift questionnaire responses but not generation outputs, indicating that questionnaire scores overestimate LLMs’ true behavioral tendencies.
By Woojung Song, Dongmin Choi, Yoonah Park, Jongwook Han, Eun-Ju Lee, Yohan Jo
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...
By Taehyeon An, Jaehyeong Park, Donghyuk Shin