Whose Norms? Disentangling Cultural and Personal Alignment in Large Language Models
Large language models are increasingly used for social decision-making situations that require balancing cultural norms with personal preferences. For example, a user preferring honesty might ask whether to correct a coworker publicly when local norms favor indirect feedback. Yet existing research studies cultural alignment and personalization largely separately. We introduce PACT, the Personal-Preference and Cultural-Norm Trade-off framework, which evaluates whether models choose to follow a cultural norm or allow personal preferences. We find that LLMs vary in how rigidly they enforce cultural norms, with behavior shifted more by country context (7.8%) than age (1%) and gender (0.7%) and shifting non-uniformly after instruction tuning. Furthermore, our five-country human study on PACT shows that culture-following in humans is mainly driven by scenario country, with the lowest agreement when participants judge their own cultural contexts, showing within-culture pluralism. Finally, human-LLM alignment experiments show that models can match majority choices, but fail to capture response distributions and uncertainty (with best correlations reaching only 0.24). Together, these findings motivate alignment evaluations that go beyond majority to capture cultural pluralism and disagreement in social judgment.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Reasoning Shapes Alignment: Investigating Cultural Alignment in Large Reasoning Models with Cultural Norms
The advanced reasoning capabilities of Large Reasoning Models enable them to thoroughly understand and apply safety policies through deliberate thought processes, thereby improving the models' safety. Beyond safety, thes…
Disentangling Topic Models: A Cross-cultural Analysis of Personal Values through Words
Sociocultural Norm Similarities and Differences via Situational Alignment and Explainable Textual Entailment
Designing systems that can reason across cultures requires that they are grounded in the norms of the contexts in which they operate. However, current research on developing computational models of social norms has prima…
DescriptiveIn-Context LearningNatural Language InferenceELAB: Extensive LLM Alignment Benchmark in Persian Language
This paper presents a comprehensive evaluation framework for aligning Persian Large Language Models (LLMs) with critical ethical dimensions, including safety, fairness, and social norms. It addresses the gaps in existing…
FairnessRed TeamingThat's All Folks: a KG of Values as Commonsense Social Norms and Behaviors
Values, as intended in ethics, determine the shape and validity of moral and social norms, grounding our everyday individual and community behavior on commonsense knowledge. Formalising latent moral content in human inte…
AllEthics