Signal or Spurious Cue? A Randomized Audit of Survey-Country Metadata in LLM Social Inference
Survey-country metadata can improve an LLM's forecast of an individual response when informative, yet the same cue may redirect the forecast when assigned at random. A within-record audit tests whether disclosing a random label's uniform, record-independent origin reduces its country-directed uptake, and whether verified survey country lowers held-out Brier loss. Independent population anchors and recorded human answers measure direction and consequence across five fixed API models, six countries, and seven development-selected targets. In the primary post-review 72-record panel, opaque and disclosed-random labels each produced country-direction shifts of 0.214. Paired attenuation was 0.0...
| Authors | Yifan Lyu, Xinran Li, Jiaqi Qiao et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 6 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 6 August 2026 |
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