One Persona, Many Cues, Different Results: How Sociodemographic Cues Impact LLM Personalization

Franziska Weeber, Vera Neplenbroek, Jan Batzner, Sebastian Padó

Keywords: personas, personalization, LLM, sociodemographics

Abstract: Personalization of LLMs by sociodemographic subgroup often improves user experience, but can also introduce or amplify biases and unfair outcomes across groups. Prior work has employed so-called personas, sociodemographic user attributes conveyed to a model, to study bias in LLMs by relying on a single cue to prompt a persona, such as user names or explicit attribute mentions. This disregards LLM sensitivity to prompt variations (robustness) and the rarity of some cues in real interactions (external validity). We compare six commonly used persona cues across seven open and proprietary LLMs on three writing and advice tasks. While cues are overall highly correlated, they produce substantial variance in responses across personas. We therefore caution against claims from a single persona cue and recommend future personalization research to evaluate multiple externally valid cues.

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Submission Type: Research Paper

Archival Status: Non-archival

Submission Number: 15