mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

You don't need a personality test to know these models are unreliable: Assessing the Reliability of Large Language Models on Psychometric Instruments

arXiv 2311.09718 ↗First posted 16 Nov 2023cs.CL cs.AIcited by 48

Not on the map. Why?

Abstract (arXiv)

The versatility of Large Language Models (LLMs) on natural language understanding tasks has made them popular for research in social sciences. To properly understand the properties and innate personas of LLMs, researchers have performed studies that involve using prompts in the form of questions that ask LLMs about particular opinions. In this study, we take a cautionary step back and examine whether the current format of prompting LLMs elicits responses in a consistent and robust manner. We first construct a dataset that contains 693 questions encompassing 39 different instruments of persona measurement on 115 persona axes. Additionally, we design a set of prompts containing minor variations and examine LLMs' capabilities to generate answers, as well as prompt variations to examine their consistency with respect to content-level variations such as switching the order of response options or negating the statement. Our experiments on 17 different LLMs reveal that even simple perturbations significantly downgrade a model's question-answering ability, and that most LLMs have low negation consistency. Our results suggest that the currently widespread practice of prompting is insufficient to accurately and reliably capture model perceptions, and we therefore discuss potential alternatives to improve these issues.

Key facts. Cited by 48 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 18 of its 52 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 16 Nov 2023.

Builds on

18 of 52 references.

References · 18

  1. 2020Language Models are Few-Shot Learnerscited by 32,199
  2. 2023Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Modelscited by 12,865
  3. 2023Quantifying Language Models' Sensitivity to Spurious Features in Prompt Design or: How I learned to start worrying about prompt formattingcited by 778
  4. 2023Whose Opinions Do Language Models Reflect?cited by 759
  5. 2023The RefinedWeb Dataset for Falcon LLM: Outperforming Curated Corpora with Web Data, and Web Data Onlycited by 755
  6. 2022Using Large Language Models to Simulate Multiple Humans and Replicate Human Subject Studiescited by 506
  7. 2021Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing via Large Pre-Trained Language Models: A Surveycited by 457
  8. 2021Do Prompt-Based Models Really Understand the Meaning of their Prompts?cited by 324
  9. 2023From Pretraining Data to Language Models to Downstream Tasks: Tracking the Trails of Political Biases Leading to Unfair NLP Modelscited by 257
  10. 2022Neural Theory-of-Mind? On the Limits of Social Intelligence in Large LMscited by 220
  11. 2023Marked Personas: Using Natural Language Prompts to Measure Stereotypes in Language Modelscited by 204
  12. 2022Who is GPT-3? An Exploration of Personality, Values and Demographicscited by 112
6 more
  1. 2022Long Time No See! Open-Domain Conversation with Long-Term Persona Memorycited by 107
  2. 2023Do LLMs Understand Social Knowledge? Evaluating the Sociability of Large Language Models with SocKET Benchmarkcited by 62
  3. 2022Can Large Language Models Truly Understand Prompts? A Case Study with Negated Promptscited by 56
  4. 2023Systematic Evaluation of GPT-3 for Zero-Shot Personality Estimationcited by 28
  5. 2023MPCHAT: Towards Multimodal Persona-Grounded Conversationcited by 24
  6. 2018Learning Personas from Dialogue with Attentive Memory Networkscited by 12

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2024: 14; 2025: 26; 2026: 8.

48 papers.

Sort:

By area:

  1. 2024Political Compass or Spinning Arrow? Towards More Meaningful Evaluations for Values and Opinions in Large Language Modelscited by 162
  2. 2024Does Prompt Formatting Have Any Impact on LLM Performance?cited by 132
  3. 2024Beyond prompt brittleness: Evaluating the reliability and consistency of political worldviews in LLMscited by 55
  4. 2024BIG5-CHAT: Shaping LLM Personalities Through Training on Human-Grounded Datacited by 49
  5. 2025The Prompt Makes the Person(a): A Systematic Evaluation of Sociodemographic Persona Prompting for Large Language Modelscited by 40
  6. 2025Pragmatics in the Era of Large Language Models: A Survey on Datasets, Evaluation, Opportunities and Challengescited by 31
  7. 2024MM-Soc: Benchmarking Multimodal Large Language Models in Social Media Platformscited by 26
  8. 2024Building Better AI Agents: A Provocation on the Utilisation of Persona in LLM-based Conversational Agentscited by 26
  9. 2024The Potential and Challenges of Evaluating Attitudes, Opinions, and Values in Large Language Modelscited by 19
  10. 2025Position is Power: System Prompts as a Mechanism of Bias in Large Language Models (LLMs)cited by 19
  11. 2025Only a Little to the Left: A Theory-grounded Measure of Political Bias in Large Language Modelscited by 15
  12. 2024Algorithmic Fidelity of Large Language Models in Generating Synthetic German Public Opinions: A Case Studycited by 14
36 more
  1. 2024The Call for Socially Aware Language Technologiescited by 12
  2. 2025Persistent Personas? Role-Playing, Instruction Following, and Safety in Extended Interactionscited by 12
  3. 2024Self-assessment, Exhibition, and Recognition: a Review of Personality in Large Language Modelscited by 10
  4. 2024Cultural Value Differences of LLMs: Prompt, Language, and Model Sizecited by 10
  5. 2025Do Psychometric Tests Work for Large Language Models? Evaluation of Tests on Sexism, Racism, and Moralitycited by 9
  6. 2025LLM Knowledge is Brittle: Truthfulness Representations Rely on Superficial Resemblancecited by 9
  7. 2025Large Language Models Often Say One Thing and Do Anothercited by 8
  8. 2025Spotting Out-of-Character Behavior: Atomic-Level Evaluation of Persona Fidelity in Open-Ended Generationcited by 8
  9. 2026Stable and Explainable Personality Trait Evaluation in Large Language Models with Internal Activationscited by 8
  10. 2024The Generation Gap: Exploring Age Bias in the Value Systems of Large Language Modelscited by 5
  11. 2025A Review of Incorporating Psychological Theories in LLMscited by 5
  12. 2025What's the Difference? Supporting Users in Identifying the Effects of Prompt and Model Changes Through Token Patternscited by 4
  13. 2025CAPE: Context-Aware Personality Evaluation Framework for Large Language Modelscited by 4
  14. 2025One Model, Many Morals: Uncovering Cross-Linguistic Misalignments in Computational Moral Reasoningcited by 4
  15. 2024Cognitive phantoms in LLMs through the lens of latent variablescited by 3
  16. 2025Are Economists Always More Introverted? Analyzing Consistency in Persona-Assigned LLMscited by 3
  17. 2025Understanding and Meeting Practitioner Needs When Measuring Representational Harms Caused by LLM-Based Systemscited by 3
  18. 2026Every Token Counts: Exact Likert-Scale Distributions for Measuring LLM Attitudes and Biasescited by 3
  19. 2025Do Language Models Think Consistently? A Study of Value Preferences Across Varying Response Lengthscited by 2
  20. 2025Leveraging In-Context Learning for Political Bias Testing of LLMscited by 2
  21. 2025Human Psychometric Questionnaires Mischaracterize LLM Behaviorcited by 2
  22. 2025Style over Story: Measuring LLM Narrative Preferences via Structured Selectioncited by 2
  23. 2026Quantifying and Mitigating Socially Desirable Responding in LLMs: A Desirability-Matched Graded Forced-Choice Psychometric Studycited by 2
  24. 2026Apparent Psychological Profiles of Large Language Models are Largely a Measurement Artifactcited by 2
  25. 2024Training LLMs to Recognize Hedges in Spontaneous Narrativescited by 1
  26. 2025Free Lunch for User Experience: Crowdsourcing Agents for Scalable User Studiescited by 1
  27. 2025Too Open for Opinion? Embracing Open-Endedness in Large Language Models for Social Simulationcited by 1
  28. 2025QSTN: A Modular Framework for Robust Questionnaire Inference with Large Language Modelscited by 1
  29. 2025R.U.Psycho? Robust Unified Psychometric Testing of Language Modelscited by 0
  30. 2025Controlled Yet Natural: A Hybrid BDI-LLM Conversational Agent for Child Helpline Trainingcited by 0
  31. 2025Social Perceptions of English Spelling Variation on Twitter: A Comparative Analysis of Human and LLM Responsescited by 0
  32. 2025MindShift: Analyzing Language Models' Reactions to Psychological Promptscited by 0
  33. 2026AuAu: A Benchmark for Auditing Authoritarian Alignment in Large Language Modelscited by 0
  34. 2026Validating LLMs in social science: Epistemic threats and emerging normscited by 0
  35. 2026Can Open-Weight Large Language Models (LLMs) Simulate Human Survey Populations? A Cross-Instrument Calibration Studycited by 0
  36. 2026Framing the Narrative: Ideological Mimicry in Large Language Modelscited by 0