The study introduces a World Values Survey–grounded simulation framework to test whether large language model agents can faithfully represent diverse human value systems. In about 4,000 conversations with 1,200 personas across three models, more than half of the agents failed to express their assigned value profiles from the start, and only 2–7% drifted over time. The results show systematic deviations from the intended value distributions and reveal that simulated dialogues differ from human discussions in their balance of stylistic consistency and semantic diversity.
By Farah Atif, Sougata Saha, Monojit Choudhury
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
The paper investigates whether large language models (LLMs) possess intrinsic value systems and how to quantify and align them. By projecting responses from 106 LLMs and 95,000 human survey profiles into a shared sociological space, the authors confirm that LLMs do have values, though these values form a concentrated, idealized core rather than mirroring human diversity. They introduce the Prior-Environment-Cognition (PEC) framework to mathematically define value expression and propose an adaptive Alignment Prescription that identifies minimal interventions—ranging from prompts to targeted parameter updates—to steer LLM values efficiently without harming general performance.
By Keqing Zhang, Jingyu Chen, Yufan Liu, Yongqiang Zhu, Nai Ding, Lai Jiang, Congyan Lang, Bing Li, Weiming Hu
arXiv:2601. 22396v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Despite the growing utility of Large Language Models (LLMs) for simulating human behavior, the extent to which these synthetic personas accurately reflect world and moral value systems across different cultural conditionings remains uncertain.
By Candida M. Greco, Lucio La Cava, Andrea Tagarelli
arXiv:2606. 12754v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Are large language models (LLMs) bad at capturing human judgment?
By Danica Dillion, Chen Cecilia Liu, Baihui Wang, Daniele Barolo, Tanmay Rajore, Niket Tandon, Pranathi Ravikumar, Kurt Gray
The paper introduces the Core Sentiment Inventory (CSI), a new personality trait evaluation tool for large language models (LLMs) that addresses reliability and validity issues found in existing methods like the Big Five Inventory (BFI). CSI is designed specifically for LLMs, supports both English and Chinese, and provides detailed psychological portraits of model behavior. Experiments show that CSI captures nuanced behavioral patterns, improves reliability, and correlates strongly (above 0.85) with real-world LLM outputs.
By Huanhuan Ma, Haisong Gong, Xiaoyuan Yi, Xing Xie, Philip S. Yu, Dongkuan Xu