# Bullying the Machine: How Personas Increase LLM Vulnerability

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.12692 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12692/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 42 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Qwen2.5 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15115/) (2024)
- [Universal and Transferable Adversarial Attacks on Aligned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15043/) (2023)
- [Gemma 3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19786/) (2025)
- [Jailbreaking Black Box Large Language Models in Twenty Queries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08419/) (2023)
- [Llama Guard: LLM-based Input-Output Safeguard for Human-AI Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06674/) (2023)
- [Instruction Tuning for Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10792/) (2023)
- [How Johnny Can Persuade LLMs to Jailbreak Them: Rethinking Persuasion to Challenge AI Safety by Humanizing LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06373/) (2024)
- ["Do Anything Now": Characterizing and Evaluating In-The-Wild Jailbreak Prompts on Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03825/) (2023)
- [DeepInception: Hypnotize Large Language Model to Be Jailbreaker](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03191/) (2023)
- [Toxicity in ChatGPT: Analyzing Persona-assigned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05335/) (2023)
- [PersonaLLM: Investigating the Ability of Large Language Models to Express Personality Traits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02547/) (2023)
- [Scalable and Transferable Black-Box Jailbreaks for Language Models via Persona Modulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03348/) (2023)
- [LLM Defenses Are Not Robust to Multi-Turn Human Jailbreaks Yet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15221/) (2024)
- [Evaluating and Inducing Personality in Pre-trained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07550/) (2022)
- [Do LLMs Have Distinct and Consistent Personality? TRAIT: Personality Testset designed for LLMs with Psychometrics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14703/) (2024)
- [Personality Alignment of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11779/) (2024)
- [Large Language Models Show Human-like Social Desirability Biases in Survey Responses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.06058/) (2024)
- [Evaluating Psychological Safety of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10529/) (2022)
- [LLMs Simulate Big Five Personality Traits: Further Evidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01765/) (2024)
- [The Better Angels of Machine Personality: How Personality Relates to LLM Safety](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12344/) (2024)
- [LLMs are Vulnerable to Malicious Prompts Disguised as Scientific Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.14073/) (2025)
- [Machine Mindset: An MBTI Exploration of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12999/) (2023)
- [StressPrompt: Does Stress Impact Large Language Models and Human Performance Similarly?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.17167/) (2024)
- [Illuminating the Black Box: A Psychometric Investigation into the Multifaceted Nature of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14202/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Measuring and Mitigating Post-hoc Rationalization in Reverse Chain-of-Thought Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.14469/) (2026)
- [Psychologically Enhanced AI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.04343/) (2025)
- [Echoes of Human Malice in Agents: Benchmarking LLMs for Multi-Turn Online Harassment Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.14207/) (2025)
- [Conflicts Make Large Reasoning Models Vulnerable to Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.09750/) (2026)
- [Latent Personality Alignment: Improving Harmlessness Without Mentioning Harms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.08496/) (2026)
- [Efficient Safety Alignment of Language Models via Latent Personality Traits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.07918/) (2026)
- [How to Trick Your AI TA: A Systematic Study of Academic Jailbreaking in LLM Code Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.10415/) (2025)
- [In Vino Veritas and Vulnerabilities: Examining LLM Safety via Drunk Language Inducement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.22169/) (2026)
- [Extracting Persona Subspaces Through Iterative Nullspace Projection For Modulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.04676/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in interactions where they are prompted to adopt personas. This paper investigates whether such persona conditioning affects model safety under bullying, an adversarial manipulation that applies psychological pressures in order to force the victim to comply to the attacker. We introduce a simulation framework in which an attacker LLM engages a victim LLM using psychologically grounded bullying tactics, while the victim adopts personas aligned with the Big Five personality traits. Experiments using multiple open-source LLMs and a wide range of adversarial goals reveal that certain persona configurations -- such as weakened agreeableness or conscientiousness -- significantly increase victim's susceptibility to unsafe outputs. Bullying tactics involving emotional or sarcastic manipulation, such as gaslighting and ridicule, are particularly effective. These findings suggest that persona-driven interaction introduces a novel vector for safety risks in LLMs and highlight the need for persona-aware safety evaluation and alignment strategies.