The paper investigates how large language models (LLMs) represent national cultural change over time, using more than two decades of World Values Survey data and the Inglehart‑Welzel cultural map. It finds that while LLMs generally place countries near their most recent surveyed positions, their representations lag behind current data, under‑capture the magnitude of change, introduce spurious movements, and rarely reproduce trajectory reversals. These temporal inaccuracies reveal a flattening effect that limits the models’ cultural awareness and raises concerns for evaluation, representational harms, and governance of culturally aware AI systems.
By Yalda Daryani, Miranda Bogen, Madeleine I. G. Daepp
The paper introduces CAPRI, a dataset of conversations designed to test whether large language models (LLMs) can adapt their responses to users’ cultural backgrounds. Experiments show that while LLMs can infer a user’s cultural context and recall relevant conventions, they frequently fail to apply this knowledge when generating answers unless explicitly prompted to do so. The study also finds that LLMs’ cultural adaptations improve as more cues are provided, yet their default priors are not culture‑neutral and sometimes reflect the model’s country of origin.
By Yisong Miao, Jian Zhu, Vered Shwartz
The paper investigates cultural biases in large language models (LLMs) by introducing the Culture-Related Open Questions (CROQ) dataset, which contains 24‑language questions about generic culture. Experiments reveal that LLMs disproportionately favor Japan in their responses, especially when prompted in high‑resource languages, while low‑resource languages tend to highlight countries where the language is official. The study also finds that these biases emerge after supervised fine‑tuning rather than during pre‑training.
By Joseba Fernandez de Landa, Carla Perez-Almendros, Jose Camacho-Collados
arXiv:2608. 07367v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used as a primary source of information and advice, understanding their alignment to humans in terms of values becomes a pressing concern.
By Maria-Louisa Wightman, Guillaume Bied, Tijl De Bie
CuBEs introduces culturally‑situated behavioral evaluations for large language models, adding cultural context to test scenarios and assessments. The authors built a human‑labeled dataset covering 12 cultures, revealing significant cross‑cultural differences that one‑size‑fits‑all judgments miss. Evaluating 13 LLMs shows that culturally situated tests uncover varied behaviors, such as Western political bias versus non‑Western religious or colonial biases, which standard evaluations overlook.
By Hoda Ayad, Tanu Mitra, Abhishek Mukherji
arXiv:2606. 07422v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models are increasingly used to answer culturally grounded questions across languages, yet it remains unclear whether local cultural knowledge is better accessed through English or the local language.
By Yang Zhang, Xiao Fei, Amr Mohamed, Sarah Almeida Carneiro, Mersin Konomi, Mingmeng Geng, Ahmed Asaad, Guokan Shang, Michalis Vazirgiannis
arXiv:2606. 12443v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Social roles shape expectations, priorities, and judgments, yet it remains unclear how large language models (LLMs) associate occupational identities with broader cultural value patterns.
By Maksim E. Eren, Andrea Brennen, Ryan C. Barron, Eric Michalak
arXiv:2609.10253v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in globally used assistants, yet their default choices in culturally grounded everyday situation...
By Bhuvan Arora, Devesh Saraogi, Sravya Varada, Dhruv Kumar
arXiv:2607. 24782v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM behavior may be conditioned by human identity in several ways: they may be asked to adapt to users, role-play populations, or forecast how people would answer value-laden questions.
By James Wedgwood, Pratiksha Thaker, Neil Kale, Virginia Smith
arXiv:2608.29266v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Researchers increasingly treat LLM survey responses as a proxy for human cultural values. This includes projecting model outputs onto instruments lik...
By An Duy Nguyen, Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad
arXiv:2607. 05405v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: To interact with users fairly and without stereotyping, AI models must display cultural competency, i.
By Vasudha Varadarajan, Akhila Yerukola, Mona T. Diab, Maarten Sap
MBBQ (Multilingual Bias Benchmark for Question-answering) is a curated extension of the English BBQ dataset that includes Dutch, Spanish, and Turkish, designed to measure stereotypes across these languages while controlling for cultural differences and task accuracy. The dataset also provides a parallel control set to assess question-answering performance independently of bias. Experiments with several open-source and proprietary LLMs show that non‑English languages can exhibit greater bias than English, and cross‑lingual bias differences persist except in the most accurate models.
By Vera Neplenbroek, Arianna Bisazza, Raquel Fern\'andez