Cultural Bias Without a Cultural Self:A Disassociation Study of LLM's Persona and Bias
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arXiv:2607.02368v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Researchers are increasingly prompting language models with cultural personas so that they answer questionnaires as diverse human groups woul...
The study investigates how demographic identity is represented in a language model, using representational similarity analysis against Pew survey data across 169 demographic cells. It finds that standard last‑token read‑outs underestimate the model’s fidelity, while specific attention heads (notably L11 H16) capture demographic structure more accurately, though race‑based types remain weak. Causal interventions reveal that high fidelity does not guarantee causal use, and a 128‑dimensional probe of a single head improves alignment with survey truth but fails to recover per‑question group ordering.
The paper introduces Cultural Divergence Preservation (CDP), a new diagnostic for evaluating whether large language models (LLMs) preserve cross‑country differences when used as synthetic survey respondents. CDP uses a single human calibration to detect cultural flattening (reduced divergence) or caricature (increased divergence) and is shown to vary monotonically with cross‑country divergence, unlike conventional Jensen–Shannon divergence metrics. Experiments across multiple LLM backbones, prompting methods, and survey domains reveal that CDP uncovers systematic discrepancies with traditional fidelity metrics, highlighting that methods favored by those metrics can still produce strong flattening.
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...
arXiv:2608.18768v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models are widely used to simulate survey respondents, yet their outputs are homogeneous and unfaithful to real inter-group differen...
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...