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ACL Findings2026

Multi-Persona Thinking for Bias Mitigation in Large Language Models

Yuxing Chen, Guoqing Luo, Zijun Wu, Lili Mou

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit social biases, which can lead to harmful stereotypes and unfair outcomes. We propose Multi-Persona Thinking (MPT), a simple inferencetime framework that reduces social bias by encouraging reasoning from multiple perspectives. MPT guides the model to consider contrasting social identities, such as male and female, together with a neutral viewpoint. These viewpoints then interact through an iterative reasoning process to identify and correct biased judgments. This design transforms the potential weakness of persona assignment into a mechanism to mitigate bias. We evaluate MPT on two widely used bias benchmarks with both open-source and closed-source models. Our results show that MPT achieves a lower bias than the existing prompting-based methods while maintaining the core reasoning ability. 1

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