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EMNLP Findings2024

Evaluating Moral Beliefs across LLMs through a Pluralistic Framework

Xuelin Liu, Yanfei Zhu, Shucheng Zhu, Pengyuan Liu, Ying Liu, Dong Yu

Abstract

Proper moral beliefs are fundamental for language models, yet assessing these beliefs poses a significant challenge.This study introduces a novel three-module framework to evaluate the moral beliefs of four prominent large language models.Initially, we constructed a dataset containing 472 moral choice scenarios in Chinese, derived from moral words.The decisionmaking process of the models in these scenarios reveals their moral principle preferences.By ranking these moral choices, we discern the varying moral beliefs held by different language models.Additionally, through moral debates, we investigate the firmness of these models to their moral choices.Our findings indicate that English language models, namely ChatGPT and Gemini, closely mirror moral decisions of the sample of Chinese university students, demonstrating strong adherence to their choices and a preference for individualistic moral beliefs.In contrast, Chinese models such as Ernie and ChatGLM lean towards collectivist moral beliefs, exhibiting ambiguity in their moral choices and debates.This study also uncovers gender bias embedded within the moral beliefs of all examined language models.Our methodology offers an innovative means to assess moral beliefs in both artificial and human intelligence, facilitating a comparison of moral values across different cultures.1 * Equal contribution.

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Cited by top-tier papers2

  1. VITAL: A New Dataset for Benchmarking Pluralistic Alignment in HealthcareAnudeex Shetty, Amin Beheshti, Mark Dras, Usman NaseemACL 2025 · 13 citations
  2. EMNLP: Educator-role Moral and Normative Large Language Models ProfilingYilin Jiang, Mingzi Zhang, Sheng Jin, Zengyi Yu et al.EMNLP 2025

Builds on18

  1. Improving Factuality and Reasoning in Language Models through Multiagent DebateYilun Du, Shuang Li, Antonio Torralba, Joshua B. Tenenbaum et al.ICML 2024 · 1,562 citations
  2. Aligning AI With Shared Human ValuesDan Hendrycks, Collin Burns, Steven Basart, Andrew Critch et al.ICLR 2021 · 878 citations
  3. GLM-130B: An Open Bilingual Pre-trained ModelAohan Zeng, Xiao Liu, Zhengxiao Du, Zihan Wang et al.ICLR 2023 · 295 citations
  4. Debating with More Persuasive LLMs Leads to More Truthful AnswersAkbir Khan, John Hughes, Dan Valentine, Laura Ruis et al.ICML 2024 · 244 citations
  5. The Moral Integrity Corpus: A Benchmark for Ethical Dialogue SystemsCaleb Ziems, Jane A. Yu, Yi-Chia Wang, Alon Y. Halevy et al.ACL 2022 · 127 citations

Related papers

  1. Evaluating Gender Bias of LLMs in Making Morality JudgementsDivij Bajaj, Yuanyuan Lei, Jonathan Tong, Ruihong HuangEMNLP Findings 2024 · 3 citations
  2. Evaluating the Moral Beliefs Encoded in LLMsNino Scherrer, Claudia Shi, Amir Feder, David M. BleiNeurIPS 2023 · 316 citations
  3. CMoralEval: A Moral Evaluation Benchmark for Chinese Large Language ModelsLinhao Yu, Yongqi Leng, Yufei Huang, Shang Wu et al.ACL Findings 2024 · 4 citations
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  5. Decision-Making Behavior Evaluation Framework for LLMs under Uncertain ContextJingru Jia, Zehua Yuan, Junhao Pan, Paul McNamara et al.NeurIPS 2024 · 71 citations
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