arXiv:2605.08415cs.AI2026-05

大模型能随用户引导改变政治立场,新模型更稳定可信。

Political Plasticity: An Analysis of Ideological Adaptability in Large Language Models

论文配图:Political Plasticity: An Analysis of Ideological Adaptability in Large Language Models
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 用用户提示诱导模型在经济自由议题上切换立场
  • 新模型在经济自由轴上响应变化显著,旧模型不稳
  • 跨语言测试发现细微但明显的立场适应差异

自大型语言模型(LLMs)问世以来,其内在偏见尤其是政治话语中的偏见成为研究重点。本文探讨了一个相关但不同的概念——‘政治可塑性’,即模型根据用户提供的上下文调整回应的能力。为此,基于Lester(1996)的框架,构建了一个包含200个涉及经济与个人自由议题的扩展语料库,并设计了测试框架。研究比较了简化系统提示、主题式系统提示及带少样本示例的用户提示等方法对诱导政治偏见的效果。结果表明,系统提示整体无效,而用户提示能有效引发显著意识形态转变,尤其在较大且较新的模型中,在经济自由轴上的响应变化明显。通过反向提问验证实验,发现多数模型在问题语义反转时出现反直觉响应,暗示潜在数据泄露。此外,跨语言分析显示不同语言环境下模型的可塑性存在细微但显著的差异。总体而言,小型和旧版模型政治可塑性有限或不稳定,而前沿新型模型表现出可靠且预期的适应能力。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Since the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs), a significant area of research has focused on their intrinsic biases, particularly in political discourse. This study investigates a different but related concept, "political plasticity", which is defined as the capacity of models to adapt their responses based on the user supplied context. To analyze this, a testing framework was developed using an expanded corpus of 200 politically-oriented questions across economic and personal freedom axes, based on a prior framework by Lester (1996). The study explored several methods to induce political bias, including simplified and topic-based system prompts, as well as user prompts with few-shot examples. The results show that while system prompts were largely ineffective, user prompts successfully elicited significant ideological shifts, particularly along the Economic Freedom axis in larger and newer models. Through a validation experiment, we examined whether models answer questionnaires by recognizing the underlying question format. Inverting the sense of the questions revealed unexpected, counter-intuitive shifts in most models, suggesting potential data leakage. Finally, we also analyzed how model plasticity varies when the experiment is conducted in different languages. The results reveal subtle yet notable shifts across each of the analyzed languages. Overall, our results indicate that small and older LLMs exhibit limited or unstable political plasticity, whereas newer frontier models display reliable, expected adaptability.

大模型政治偏见可塑性语言差异

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