Cross-Model Humor Preference Modeling with Cards Against Humanity
Victor Winter, Farhan Lakhany
Abstract
This paper investigates whether one large language model can approximate the humor preferences of another in a controlled Cards Against Humanity-style task. Two models - GPT-4o as Czar and Claude Opus-4.5 as Player - are evaluated on a binary humor-selection task constructed so that success cannot follow from self-preference. A reflected-cell stability procedure isolates 244 hands on which the two models hold deterministic but opposite preferences, partitioned into a 97-hand context pool and a 147-hand held-out test pool. The Player is then evaluated across five graded conditions: default self-preference, generic Czar-modeling instruction, model-identified Czar, prior Czar selections, and prior Czar selections with rationales. This gradient is designed to separate two sources of improvement: framing effects, in which the Player is told to attend to a Czar without seeing any of the Czar's behavior, and direct behavioral evidence, in which the Player is shown the Czar's prior choices. Player accuracy increased from 0.7% in Condition 1 to 19.0% and 25.9% in the framing-only conditions, and then rose to 72.8% and 82.3% once behavioral evidence and rationales were provided. An omnibus Cochran's Q test and pairwise McNemar tests confirmed that each step in the gradient produced a significant improvement. The results indicate that role instruction and model identity yield only modest gains, while behavioral evidence - especially when accompanied by rationales - supports substantial cross-model preference modeling. The findings are interpreted as theory-of-mind-like behavior in an operational rather than representational sense: the Player shifts away from self-preference toward another agent's demonstrated preferences, without any claim about an underlying representation of mental states.
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