# Cultural Conditioning or Placebo? On the Effectiveness of Socio-Demographic Prompting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.11661 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11661/

## Key facts

- Cited by 22 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 42 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Jun 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06180/) (2023)
- [Quantifying Language Models' Sensitivity to Spurious Features in Prompt Design or: How I learned to start worrying about prompt formatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11324/) (2023)
- [Aligning AI With Shared Human Values](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02275/) (2020)
- [Towards Measuring the Representation of Subjective Global Opinions in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16388/) (2023)
- [From Pretraining Data to Language Models to Downstream Tasks: Tracking the Trails of Political Biases Leading to Unfair NLP Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08283/) (2023)
- [Marked Personas: Using Natural Language Prompts to Measure Stereotypes in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18189/) (2023)
- [Large Pre-trained Language Models Contain Human-like Biases of What is Right and Wrong to Do](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11790/) (2021)
- [Cultural Alignment in Large Language Models: An Explanatory Analysis Based on Hofstede's Cultural Dimensions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.12342/) (2023)
- [Aligning Language Models to User Opinions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14929/) (2023)
- [NLPositionality: Characterizing Design Biases of Datasets and Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01943/) (2023)
- [SeaEval for Multilingual Foundation Models: From Cross-Lingual Alignment to Cultural Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.04766/) (2023)
- [Sensitivity, Performance, Robustness: Deconstructing the Effect of Sociodemographic Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07034/) (2023)
- [CULTURE-GEN: Revealing Global Cultural Perception in Language Models through Natural Language Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10199/) (2024)
- [Large Language Models Only Pass Primary School Exams in Indonesia: A Comprehensive Test on IndoMMLU](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.04928/) (2023)
- [Multi-lingual and Multi-cultural Figurative Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16171/) (2023)
- [RiSAWOZ: A Large-Scale Multi-Domain Wizard-of-Oz Dataset with Rich Semantic Annotations for Task-Oriented Dialogue Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.08738/) (2020)
- [IndoCulture: Exploring Geographically-Influenced Cultural Commonsense Reasoning Across Eleven Indonesian Provinces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01854/) (2024)
- [Are Personalized Stochastic Parrots More Dangerous? Evaluating Persona Biases in Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05280/) (2023)
- [EtiCor: Corpus for Analyzing LLMs for Etiquettes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18974/) (2023)
- [SODAPOP: Open-Ended Discovery of Social Biases in Social Commonsense Reasoning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07269/) (2022)
- [Sociocultural Norm Similarities and Differences via Situational Alignment and Explainable Textual Entailment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14492/) (2023)
- [Evaluating the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion of NLP Technology: A Case Study for Indian Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12676/) (2022)
- [Cultural Compass: Predicting Transfer Learning Success in Offensive Language Detection with Cultural Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06458/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Survey of Cultural Awareness in Language Models: Text and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00860/) (2024)
- [Multilingual Prompting for Improving LLM Generation Diversity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15229/) (2025)
- [Which Demographics do LLMs Default to During Annotation?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08820/) (2024)
- [Fluent but Foreign: Even Regional LLMs Lack Cultural Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21548/) (2025)
- [Culture is Everywhere: A Call for Intentionally Cultural Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.01301/) (2025)
- [Meta-Cultural Competence: Climbing the Right Hill of Cultural Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.09637/) (2025)
- [Revisiting LLM Value Probing Strategies: Are They Robust and Expressive?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.13490/) (2025)
- ["A Woman is More Culturally Knowledgeable than A Man?": The Effect of Personas on Cultural Norm Interpretation in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.11636/) (2024)
- [Can Third-parties Read Our Emotions?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.18673/) (2025)
- [PakBBQ: A Culturally Adapted Bias Benchmark for QA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10186/) (2025)
- [Kalahi: A handcrafted, grassroots cultural LLM evaluation suite for Filipino](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.15380/) (2024)
- [From Anger to Joy: How Nationality Personas Shape Emotion Attribution in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02431/) (2025)
- [XToM: Exploring the Multilingual Theory of Mind for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02461/) (2025)
- [Improving the Distributional Alignment of LLMs using Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.00439/) (2025)
- [User Behavior Prediction as a Generic, Robust, Scalable, and Low-Cost Evaluation Strategy for Estimating Generalization in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05266/) (2025)
- [Language Models Entangle Language and Culture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.15337/) (2026)
- [To Generate or Discriminate? Methodological Considerations for Measuring Cultural Alignment in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.02858/) (2026)
- [PartisanLens: A Multilingual Dataset of Hyperpartisan and Conspiratorial Immigration Narratives in European Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.03860/) (2026)
- [Signal or Spurious Cue? A Randomized Audit of Survey-Country Metadata in LLM Social Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.06085/) (2026)
- [Hints Help But Do They Teach? Evaluating Skills Transfer in Code Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.01106/) (2026)
- [Alignment by Stereotyping: How LLMs Sacrifice Individual Distinctiveness for Cultural Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.05993/) (2026)
- [Measuring Cultural Alignment Beyond the Average: A Framework for Evaluating Maternal-Health LLM Interactions in Indian Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.11586/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Socio-demographic prompting is a commonly employed approach to study cultural biases in LLMs as well as for aligning models to certain cultures. In this paper, we systematically probe four LLMs (Llama 3, Mistral v0.2, GPT-3.5 Turbo and GPT-4) with prompts that are conditioned on culturally sensitive and non-sensitive cues, on datasets that are supposed to be culturally sensitive (EtiCor and CALI) or neutral (MMLU and ETHICS). We observe that all models except GPT-4 show significant variations in their responses on both kinds of datasets for both kinds of prompts, casting doubt on the robustness of the culturally-conditioned prompting as a method for eliciting cultural bias in models or as an alignment strategy. The work also calls rethinking the control experiment design to tease apart the cultural conditioning of responses from "placebo effect", i.e., random perturbations of model responses due to arbitrary tokens in the prompt.