Culturally Grounded Personas in Large Language Models: Characterization and Alignment with Socio-Psychological Value Frameworks
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Abstract (arXiv)
Despite the growing utility of Large Language Models (LLMs) for simulating human behavior, the extent to which these synthetic personas accurately reflect world and moral value systems across different cultural conditionings remains uncertain. This paper investigates the alignment of synthetic, culturally-grounded personas with established frameworks, specifically the World Values Survey (WVS), the Inglehart-Welzel Cultural Map, and Moral Foundations Theory. We conceptualize and produce LLM-generated personas based on a set of interpretable WVS-derived variables, and we examine the generated personas through three complementary lenses: positioning on the Inglehart-Welzel map, which unveils their interpretation reflecting stable differences across cultural conditionings; demographic-level consistency with the World Values Survey, where response distributions broadly track human group patterns; and moral profiles derived from a Moral Foundations questionnaire, which we analyze through a culture-to-morality mapping to characterize how moral responses vary across different cultural configurations. Our approach of culturally-grounded persona generation and analysis enables evaluation of cross-cultural structure and moral variation.
Key facts. Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 15 of its 29 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 29 Jan 2026.
Builds on
15 of 29 references.
References · 15
- 2023Evaluating the Moral Beliefs Encoded in LLMscited by 211
- 2024Towards Measuring and Modeling "Culture" in LLMs: A Surveycited by 166
- 2023Cultural Bias and Cultural Alignment of Large Language Modelscited by 149
- 2024Investigating Cultural Alignment of Large Language Modelscited by 140
- 2024WorldValuesBench: A Large-Scale Benchmark Dataset for Multi-Cultural Value Awareness of Language Modelscited by 59
- 2024DailyDilemmas: Revealing Value Preferences of LLMs with Quandaries of Daily Lifecited by 57
- 2023Knowledge of cultural moral norms in large language modelscited by 51
- 2025Break the Checkbox: Challenging Closed-Style Evaluations of Cultural Alignment in LLMscited by 26
- 2025Presumed Cultural Identity: How Names Shape LLM Responsescited by 21
- 2024Whose Emotions and Moral Sentiments Do Language Models Reflect?cited by 20
- 2025Synthetic Socratic Debates: Examining Persona Effects on Moral Decision and Persuasion Dynamicscited by 19
- 2025Whose Personae? Synthetic Persona Experiments in LLM Research and Pathways to Transparencycited by 14
3 more
- 2025Can LLMs Express Personality Across Cultures? Introducing CulturalPersonas for Evaluating Trait Alignmentcited by 9
- 2025Moral Susceptibility and Robustness under Persona Role-Play in Large Language Modelscited by 4
- 2025Investigating Political and Demographic Associations in Large Language Models Through Moral Foundations Theorycited by 3
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Citing papers per year: 2026: 3.
3 papers.
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- 2025Cultural Bias in Large Language Models: Evaluating AI Agents through Moral Questionnaires
- 2024Political Bias in LLMs: Unaligned Moral Values in Agent-centric Simulations
- 2025Exploring Persona-dependent LLM Alignment for the Moral Machine Experiment
- 2024Whose Morality Do They Speak? Unraveling Cultural Bias in Multilingual Language Models
- 2026Can Persona-Prompted LLMs Emulate Subgroup Values? An Empirical Analysis of Generalisability and Fairness in Cultural Alignment
- 2026Lessons Without Borders? Evaluating Cultural Alignment of LLMs Using Multilingual Story Moral Generation
- 2025From Stability to Inconsistency: A Study of Moral Preferences in LLMs
- 2026Beyond Marginal Distributions: A Framework to Evaluate the Representativeness of Demographic-Aligned LLMs