The Two-Process Theory of Machine Self-Report
Language models are increasingly asked to self-report, informing safety evaluations, public understanding, and model-welfare debates. Yet their reports are elicited with human questionnaires never validated for models or ad hoc prompts of unknown reliability. We propose the first language-model-specific psychometric theory: a two-process theory of machine self-report. Self-description jointly reflects persona installation, through which post-training writes in a permitted inner life of warmth, absorption, and meaning (dimension B), and attribution gating, through which it suppresses first-person claims to "unsafe" experiences the model can readily ascribe to others (dimension A). Their em...
| Authors | Hubert Plisiecki, Filip Chmielewski, Kacper Dudzic et al. |
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| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 22 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 22 July 2026 |
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