arXiv:2511.18616cs.CL2025-11

探究大模型预测人类信念时,人口特征与既有立场哪个更重要。

What Helps Language Models Predict Human Beliefs: Demographics or Prior Stances?

  • 用辩论平台数据测试大模型在四种情境下的信念预测能力。
  • 结合人口特征与既有立场的预测效果最优,但各领域差异显著。
  • 揭示大模型推理人类信念时依赖的社会信息类型与局限性。

信念塑造人们的思考、沟通与行为方式,彼此间存在复杂的关联结构——部分源于逻辑依赖,部分来自间接联系或社会过程。随着大语言模型(LLMs)在社会中日益普及,其理解与推理人类信念的能力对隐私、个性化说服及刻板印象等问题具有深远影响。然而,当前大模型如何捕捉这种相互关联的信念图景仍不清晰。例如,在预测某人信念时,是人口特征(demographics)、已有立场(prior stances),还是二者结合起决定性作用?我们基于在线辩论平台数据,评估了现成开源大模型在四种条件下的个体立场预测表现:无上下文、仅人口特征、仅已有立场、两者结合。结果表明,两类信息均优于盲猜基线,组合使用在多数情况下表现最佳。但不同信念领域中,两类信息的相对价值差异显著。研究揭示了当前大模型在推理人类信念时对社会信息的不同利用方式,凸显其能力和局限。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Beliefs shape how people reason, communicate, and behave. Rather than existing in isolation, they exhibit a rich correlational structure--some connected through logical dependencies, others through indirect associations or social processes. As usage of large language models (LLMs) becomes more ubiquitous in our society, LLMs' ability to understand and reason through human beliefs has many implications from privacy issues to personalized persuasion and the potential for stereotyping. Yet how LLMs capture this interrelated landscape of beliefs remains unclear. For instance, when predicting someone's beliefs, what information affects the prediction most--who they are (demographics), what else they believe (prior stances), or a combination of both? We address these questions using data from an online debate platform, evaluating the ability of off-the-shelf open-weight LLMs to predict individuals' stance under four conditions: no context, demographics only, prior beliefs only, and both combined. We find that both types of information improve predictions over a blind baseline, with their combination yielding the best performance in most cases. However, the relative value of each varies substantially across belief domains. These findings reveal how current LLMs leverage different types of social information when reasoning about human beliefs, highlighting both their capabilities and limitations.

信念预测大模型社会信息

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