German General Social Survey Personas: A Survey-Derived Persona Prompt Collection for Population-Aligned LLM Studies

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Rupprecht, Jens, Fröhling, Leon, Wagner, Claudia, Strohmaier, Markus
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Rupprecht, Jens
Fröhling, Leon
Wagner, Claudia
Strohmaier, Markus
author_facet Rupprecht, Jens
Fröhling, Leon
Wagner, Claudia
Strohmaier, Markus
contents The use of Large Language Models (LLMs) for simulating human perspectives via persona prompting is gaining traction in computational social science. However, well-curated, empirically grounded persona collections remain scarce, limiting the accuracy and representativeness of such simulations. Here, we introduce the German General Social Survey Personas (GGSS Personas) collection, a comprehensive and representative persona prompt collection built from the German General Social Survey (ALLBUS). The GGSS Personas and their persona prompts are designed to be easily plugged into prompts for all types of LLMs and tasks, steering models to generate responses aligned with the underlying German population. We evaluate GGSS Personas by prompting various LLMs to simulate survey response distributions across diverse topics, demonstrating that GGSS Personas-guided LLMs outperform state-of-the-art classifiers, particularly under data scarcity. Furthermore, we analyze how the representativity and attribute selection within persona prompts affect alignment with population responses. Our findings suggest that GGSS Personas provide a potentially valuable resource for research on LLM-based social simulations that enables more systematic explorations of population-aligned persona prompting in NLP and social science research.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_21722
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle German General Social Survey Personas: A Survey-Derived Persona Prompt Collection for Population-Aligned LLM Studies
Rupprecht, Jens
Fröhling, Leon
Wagner, Claudia
Strohmaier, Markus
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Computers and Society
The use of Large Language Models (LLMs) for simulating human perspectives via persona prompting is gaining traction in computational social science. However, well-curated, empirically grounded persona collections remain scarce, limiting the accuracy and representativeness of such simulations. Here, we introduce the German General Social Survey Personas (GGSS Personas) collection, a comprehensive and representative persona prompt collection built from the German General Social Survey (ALLBUS). The GGSS Personas and their persona prompts are designed to be easily plugged into prompts for all types of LLMs and tasks, steering models to generate responses aligned with the underlying German population. We evaluate GGSS Personas by prompting various LLMs to simulate survey response distributions across diverse topics, demonstrating that GGSS Personas-guided LLMs outperform state-of-the-art classifiers, particularly under data scarcity. Furthermore, we analyze how the representativity and attribute selection within persona prompts affect alignment with population responses. Our findings suggest that GGSS Personas provide a potentially valuable resource for research on LLM-based social simulations that enables more systematic explorations of population-aligned persona prompting in NLP and social science research.
title German General Social Survey Personas: A Survey-Derived Persona Prompt Collection for Population-Aligned LLM Studies
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Computers and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.21722