arXiv Computation and Language By An-Sheng Jhang

Multi-Estimate Elicitation Does Not Uniformly Debias Language Model Judgments

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The study investigates whether prompting language models to provide five weighted estimates in a single response can reduce bias in their judgments. Across various bias tasks—anchoring, hindsight, base‑rate, conjunction, and status‑quo/default—the authors compare direct numerical answers with a multi‑estimate format, testing different source framings, random cues, and probability‑consistency constraints on three models (gpt‑6.1‑sol, claude‑sonnet‑5.5, and Qwen3‑8B). Results show that while direct elicitation reduces irrelevant‑anchor indices and status‑quo effects in two configurations, multi‑estimate elicitation does not consistently debias or attenuate responses, and the observed effects are limited by noise and lack of equivalence.

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