# How Inclusively do LMs Perceive Social and Moral Norms?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.02696 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.02696/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Feb 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Towards Understanding Sycophancy in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13548/) (2023)
- [Language (Technology) is Power: A Critical Survey of "Bias" in NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14050/) (2020)
- [Discovering Language Model Behaviors with Model-Written Evaluations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09251/) (2022)
- [Whose Opinions Do Language Models Reflect?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17548/) (2023)
- [Towards Measuring the Representation of Subjective Global Opinions in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16388/) (2023)
- [Men Also Like Shopping: Reducing Gender Bias Amplification using Corpus-level Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.09457/) (2017)
- [A Corpus and Evaluation Framework for Deeper Understanding of Commonsense Stories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01696/) (2016)
- [Annotators with Attitudes: How Annotator Beliefs And Identities Bias Toxic Language Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.07997/) (2021)
- [Social Chemistry 101: Learning to Reason about Social and Moral Norms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00620/) (2020)
- ["Kelly is a Warm Person, Joseph is a Role Model": Gender Biases in LLM-Generated Reference Letters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09219/) (2023)
- [The political ideology of conversational AI: Converging evidence on ChatGPT's pro-environmental, left-libertarian orientation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.01768/) (2023)
- [Having Beer after Prayer? Measuring Cultural Bias in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14456/) (2023)
- [On Releasing Annotator-Level Labels and Information in Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.05699/) (2021)
- [Is Your Toxicity My Toxicity? Exploring the Impact of Rater Identity on Toxicity Annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.00501/) (2022)
- ["I'm fully who I am": Towards Centering Transgender and Non-Binary Voices to Measure Biases in Open Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.09941/) (2023)
- [Everyone's Voice Matters: Quantifying Annotation Disagreement Using Demographic Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.05036/) (2023)
- [Detecting Stance in Media on Global Warming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.15149/) (2020)
- [Modeling Semantic Plausibility by Injecting World Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00619/) (2018)
- [Vicarious Offense and Noise Audit of Offensive Speech Classifiers: Unifying Human and Machine Disagreement on What is Offensive](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12534/) (2023)
- [Rater Cohesion and Quality from a Vicarious Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.08411/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Beyond the Reported Cutoff: Where Large Language Models Fall Short on Financial Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.00042/) (2025)
- [Structuring the Space of Sociotechnical Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.01250/) (2026)
- [IPO-Mine: A Toolkit and Dataset for Section-Structured Analysis of Long, Multimodal IPO Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.28714/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper discusses and contains offensive content. Language models (LMs) are used in decision-making systems and as interactive assistants. However, how well do these models making judgements align with the diversity of human values, particularly regarding social and moral norms? In this work, we investigate how inclusively LMs perceive norms across demographic groups (e.g., gender, age, and income). We prompt 11 LMs on rules-of-thumb (RoTs) and compare their outputs with the existing responses of 100 human annotators. We introduce the Absolute Distance Alignment Metric (ADA-Met) to quantify alignment on ordinal questions. We find notable disparities in LM responses, with younger, higher-income groups showing closer alignment, raising concerns about the representation of marginalized perspectives. Our findings highlight the importance of further efforts to make LMs more inclusive of diverse human values. The code and prompts are available on GitHub under the CC BY-NC 4.0 license.