mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Talent or Luck? Evaluating Attribution Bias in Large Language Models

arXiv 2505.22910 ↗First posted 28 May 2025cs.CLcited by 2

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Abstract (arXiv)

When a student fails an exam, do we tend to blame their effort or the test's difficulty? Attribution, defined as how reasons are assigned to event outcomes, shapes perceptions, reinforces stereotypes, and influences decisions. Attribution Theory in social psychology explains how humans assign responsibility for events using implicit cognition, attributing causes to internal (e.g., effort, ability) or external (e.g., task difficulty, luck) factors. LLMs' attribution of event outcomes based on demographics carries important fairness implications. Most works exploring social biases in LLMs focus on surface-level associations or isolated stereotypes. This work proposes a cognitively grounded bias evaluation framework to identify how models' reasoning disparities channelize biases toward demographic groups.

Key facts. Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 25 of its 43 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 28 May 2025.

Builds on

25 of 43 references.

References · 25

  1. 2019A Survey on Bias and Fairness in Machine Learningcited by 1,917
  2. 2016Man is to Computer Programmer as Woman is to Homemaker? Debiasing Word Embeddingscited by 1,312
  3. 2020StereoSet: Measuring stereotypical bias in pretrained language modelscited by 924
  4. 2016Semantics derived automatically from language corpora contain human-like biasescited by 901
  5. 2020CrowS-Pairs: A Challenge Dataset for Measuring Social Biases in Masked Language Modelscited by 710
  6. 2021BBQ: A Hand-Built Bias Benchmark for Question Answeringcited by 701
  7. 2018Gender Bias in Coreference Resolution: Evaluation and Debiasing Methodscited by 659
  8. 2020Null It Out: Guarding Protected Attributes by Iterative Nullspace Projectioncited by 455
  9. 2018Gender Bias in Coreference Resolutioncited by 442
  10. 2017Men Also Like Shopping: Reducing Gender Bias Amplification using Corpus-level Constraintscited by 420
  11. 2021Towards Understanding and Mitigating Social Biases in Language Modelscited by 296
  12. 2020Social Chemistry 101: Learning to Reason about Social and Moral Normscited by 255
13 more
  1. 2021Societal Biases in Language Generation: Progress and Challengescited by 202
  2. 2023"Kelly is a Warm Person, Joseph is a Role Model": Gender Biases in LLM-Generated Reference Letterscited by 199
  3. 2021Large Pre-trained Language Models Contain Human-like Biases of What is Right and Wrong to Docited by 178
  4. 2024Cognitive Bias in Decision-Making with LLMscited by 106
  5. 2019It's All in the Name: Mitigating Gender Bias with Name-Based Counterfactual Data Substitutioncited by 103
  6. 2021On Measures of Biases and Harms in NLPcited by 81
  7. 2024Gender, Race, and Intersectional Bias in Resume Screening via Language Model Retrievalcited by 51
  8. 2024Prompting Techniques for Reducing Social Bias in LLMs through System 1 and System 2 Cognitive Processescited by 39
  9. 2025Explicit vs. Implicit: Investigating Social Bias in Large Language Models through Self-Reflectioncited by 27
  10. 2024Breaking Bias, Building Bridges: Evaluation and Mitigation of Social Biases in LLMs via Contact Hypothesiscited by 20
  11. 2024Cognitive Biases in Large Language Models: A Survey and Mitigation Experimentscited by 20
  12. 2023Nichelle and Nancy: The Influence of Demographic Attributes and Tokenization Length on First Name Biasescited by 12
  13. 2024Evaluating Implicit Bias in Large Language Models by Attacking From a Psychometric Perspectivecited by 6

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 2.

2 papers.

  1. 2026Large Language Model Reasoning Failurescited by 21
  2. 2026Prefill Awareness in Large Language Modelscited by 4