Whose Norms? Disentangling Cultural and Personal Alignment in Large Language Models
Large language models are increasingly used for social decision-making situations that require balancing cultural norms with personal preferences. For example, a user preferring honesty might ask whether to correct a coworker publicly when local norms favor indirect feedback. Yet existing research studies cultural alignment and personalization largely separately. We introduce PACT, the Personal-Preference and Cultural-Norm Trade-off framework, which evaluates whether models choose to follow a cultural norm or allow personal preferences. We find that LLMs vary in how rigidly they enforce cultural norms, with behavior shifted more by country context (7.8%) than age (1%) and gender (0.7%) an...
| Authors | Angana Borah, Isabelle Augenstein, Rada Mihalcea |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 5 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 5 June 2026 |
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