Narration-of-Thought: Inference-Time Scaffolding for Defeasible Ethical Reasoning in Large Language Models
Standard chain-of-thought on moral dilemmas exhibits two failure modes: stakeholder collapse (the trace names at most one party with a stake in the outcome) and uncertainty suppression (no explicit unknowns or hedges before committing to an action). We introduce narration-of-thought (NoT), a system prompt that structures chain-of-thought into five sections: protagonist, stakeholders, two-step consequences, uncertainty, then commitment. NoT adds no training, parameters, or fine-tuning. On 100 DailyDilemmas scenarios across four generators from three vendors, NoT cuts stakeholder collapse from up to 31% to under 1% and uncertainty suppression from up to 72% to 1-24% on every model. A matche...
| Authors | Patrick Cooper, Alvaro Velasquez |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 24 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 9 July 2026 |
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