Unmasking Implicit Bias: Evaluating Persona-Prompted LLM Responses in Power-Disparate Social Scenarios

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Autori principali: Tan, Bryan Chen Zhengyu, Lee, Roy Ka-Wei
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Tan, Bryan Chen Zhengyu
Lee, Roy Ka-Wei
author_facet Tan, Bryan Chen Zhengyu
Lee, Roy Ka-Wei
contents Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in simulating human behaviour and social intelligence. However, they risk perpetuating societal biases, especially when demographic information is involved. We introduce a novel framework using cosine distance to measure semantic shifts in responses and an LLM-judged Preference Win Rate (WR) to assess how demographic prompts affect response quality across power-disparate social scenarios. Evaluating five LLMs over 100 diverse social scenarios and nine demographic axes, our findings suggest a "default persona" bias toward middle-aged, able-bodied, native-born, Caucasian, atheistic males with centrist views. Moreover, interactions involving specific demographics are associated with lower-quality responses. Lastly, the presence of power disparities increases variability in response semantics and quality across demographic groups, suggesting that implicit biases may be heightened under power-imbalanced conditions. These insights expose the demographic biases inherent in LLMs and offer potential paths toward future bias mitigation efforts in LLMs.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_01532
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Unmasking Implicit Bias: Evaluating Persona-Prompted LLM Responses in Power-Disparate Social Scenarios
Tan, Bryan Chen Zhengyu
Lee, Roy Ka-Wei
Computers and Society
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in simulating human behaviour and social intelligence. However, they risk perpetuating societal biases, especially when demographic information is involved. We introduce a novel framework using cosine distance to measure semantic shifts in responses and an LLM-judged Preference Win Rate (WR) to assess how demographic prompts affect response quality across power-disparate social scenarios. Evaluating five LLMs over 100 diverse social scenarios and nine demographic axes, our findings suggest a "default persona" bias toward middle-aged, able-bodied, native-born, Caucasian, atheistic males with centrist views. Moreover, interactions involving specific demographics are associated with lower-quality responses. Lastly, the presence of power disparities increases variability in response semantics and quality across demographic groups, suggesting that implicit biases may be heightened under power-imbalanced conditions. These insights expose the demographic biases inherent in LLMs and offer potential paths toward future bias mitigation efforts in LLMs.
title Unmasking Implicit Bias: Evaluating Persona-Prompted LLM Responses in Power-Disparate Social Scenarios
topic Computers and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.01532