Do LLMs Really Lack Difference Awareness? Uncovering Heuristic Substitution in Group-Differentiating Fairness
In this paper, we investigate the issue of difference awareness in LLMs, defined as a model's ability to recognize and acknowledge meaningful differences between social groups in fairness decision-making. Previous studies have consistently shown that models perform poorly on such tasks, a finding commonly attributed to a lack of difference awareness. We propose an alternative account, which we term Fairness Heuristic Substitution: difference awareness is not necessarily absent, but the complex demand of simultaneously identifying relevant group differences and determining their implications for fairness decisions may lead models to substitute the simpler, more accessible equal-treatment h...
| Authors | Jingshen Zhang, Bo Wang, Yanlin Fu et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.SI |
| Published | 18 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 18 October 2026 |
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