Yalda Daryani, Miranda Bogen, Madeleine I. G. Daeppcs.CY cs.AI cs.CL
Assessments of cultural alignment have become an important part of the development and improvement of large language models (LLMs). However, the majority of the evaluations treat culture as a single snapshot, investigating only whether a model represents a society accurately at the current time. Research in cultural psychology shows that cultural values change at different rates and directions over time. Therefore, a "culturally aware" model should capture not only where a culture is today but also how it has changed over time. We examine this missing dimension of cultural awareness using more than two decades of the World Values Survey data. We compare the cultural trajectories of 40 countries with the trajectories produced by four state-of-the-art (SOTA) LLMs on the Inglehart-Welzel cultural map. Our findings show that while models generally place countries close to their most recent surveyed positions, these representations tend to lag several years behind that position. They also capture only part of the magnitude of the observed change, introduce movement where little occurred, and rarely reproduce reversals in countries' trajectories. These findings point to temporal flattening and suggest that snapshot accuracy can give an incomplete picture of cultural awareness in LLMs and have implications for model evaluation, representational harms, and the governance of culturally aware AI systems.
James Wedgwood, Pratiksha Thaker, Neil Kale +1cs.AI
LLM behavior may be conditioned by human identity in several ways: they may be asked to adapt to users, role-play populations, or forecast how people would answer value-laden questions. We test whether these framings are interchangeable using the World Values Survey (WVS). We evaluate GPT-5.4, Claude Sonnet 4.6, Gemini 2.5 Flash, and Qwen3-235B on 101 WVS-derived questions across 13 language-country slices, comparing a language-only baseline with user-country, persona-country, and third-person prompts. Across 21,008 model-response rows, prompt framing is a first-order determinant of cultural alignment: country cues often shift answers substantially, but not all shifts move toward matched human response distributions. Third-person forecasting yields the strongest directional alignment for three of the four hosted models, while personalization and role-play are weaker or less stable. Alignment gains concentrate on salient value dimensions such as religiosity, gender roles, and work-oriented material values, whereas institutional trust and democracy-related questions remain difficult. These results show that prompt framing is not a cosmetic choice in cultural value elicitation; it changes both model behavior and measured alignment.
The paper explores how "culture" can be operationalised in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and what this reveals about the possibilities and limits of considering a plurality of cultural backgrounds in technological design. It proposes that cultural alignment cannot be achieved only by adding more examples of "other cultures", rather it requires plural epistemologies: allowing multiple, locally grounded ways of knowing. To analyze how this plurality of knowing can be addressed in NLP, the paper uses a socio-technical model of language technology (LT) design, the five layers of technological activity model, for collecting and systematizing approaches to culture in NLP. The analysis shows that while NLP research has made progress toward more culturally sensitive systems, many approaches remain partial, addressing "culture" primarily at the level of output or representation while leaving deeper questions of power, governance, and social context unresolved. The paper concludes that operationalising culture requires much more than technical adaptation; it suggests a reflexive and plural socio-technical approach that navigates potentials and limits of computational formalisation for accounting multiple linguistic and socio-cultural backgrounds.