# Do Persona-Infused LLMs Affect Performance in a Strategic Reasoning Game?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.06867 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.06867/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Reasoning benchmarks and evaluation, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 22 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Dec 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Reasoning benchmarks and evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/lr/reasoning-benchmarks-and-evaluation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Scaling Synthetic Data Creation with 1,000,000,000 Personas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.20094/) (2024)
- [Two Tales of Persona in LLMs: A Survey of Role-Playing and Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01171/) (2024)
- [Quantifying the Persona Effect in LLM Simulations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10811/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Large Language Model-Based Game Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02039/) (2024)
- [LLM as a Mastermind: A Survey of Strategic Reasoning with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01230/) (2024)
- [PersonaGym: Evaluating Persona Agents and LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.18416/) (2024)
- [LLM Generated Persona is a Promise with a Catch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16527/) (2025)
- [LLM Agents in Interaction: Measuring Personality Consistency and Linguistic Alignment in Interacting Populations of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02896/) (2024)
- [Persona is a Double-edged Sword: Mitigating the Negative Impact of Role-playing Prompts in Zero-shot Reasoning Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.08631/) (2024)
- [OPeRA: A Dataset of Observation, Persona, Rationale, and Action for Evaluating LLMs on Human Online Shopping Behavior Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05606/) (2025)
- [From Personas to Talks: Revisiting the Impact of Personas on LLM-Synthesized Emotional Support Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11451/) (2025)
- [Simulating Human Strategic Behavior: Comparing Single and Multi-agent LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.08189/) (2024)
- [Agents of Change: Self-Evolving LLM Agents for Strategic Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.04651/) (2025)
- [Mixture-of-Personas Language Models for Population Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.05019/) (2025)
- [Very Large-Scale Multi-Agent Simulation in AgentScope](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.17789/) (2024)
- [PersonaFlow: Designing LLM-Simulated Expert Perspectives for Enhanced Research Ideation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12538/) (2024)
- [Can LLM Agents Maintain a Persona in Discourse?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11843/) (2025)
- [Exploring Changes in Nation Perception with Nationality-Assigned Personas in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.13993/) (2024)
- [Humanizing Machines: Rethinking LLM Anthropomorphism Through a Multi-Level Framework of Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.17573/) (2025)
- [Designing Role Vectors to Improve LLM Inference Behaviour](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12055/) (2025)
- [HARBOR: Exploring Persona Dynamics in Multi-Agent Competition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12149/) (2025)
- [Evaluating the Simulation of Human Personality-Driven Susceptibility to Misinformation with LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23610/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Assessing the Reliability of Persona-Conditioned LLMs as Synthetic Survey Respondents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.18462/) (2026)
- [Towards Generalist Game Players: An Investigation of Foundation Models in the Game Multiverse](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.09965/) (2026)
- [Symbolic Reasoning Frameworks Trigger Memory-Mediated Ecosystem Dynamics in Multi-Agent LLM Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.07552/) (2026)
- [PREFER: From Player Experience to Personalized Game Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.19213/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Although persona prompting in large language models appears to trigger different styles of generated text, it is unclear whether these translate into measurable behavioral differences, much less whether they affect decision-making in an adversarial strategic environment that we provide as open-source. We investigate the impact of persona prompting on strategic performance in PERIL, a world-domination board game. Specifically, we compare the effectiveness of persona-derived heuristic strategies to those chosen manually. Our findings reveal that certain personas associated with strategic thinking improve game performance, but only when a mediator is used to translate personas into heuristic values. We introduce this mediator as a structured translation process, inspired by exploratory factor analysis, that maps LLM-generated inventory responses into heuristics. Results indicate our method enhances heuristic reliability and face validity compared to directly inferred heuristics, allowing us to better study the effect of persona types on decision making. These insights advance our understanding of how persona prompting influences LLM-based decision-making and propose a heuristic generation method that applies psychometric principles to LLMs.