Moral Foundations of Large Language Models

Marwa Abdulhai, Gregory Serapio-García, Clement Crepy, Daria Valter, John Canny, Natasha Jaques


Abstract
Moral foundations theory (MFT) is a psychological assessment tool that decomposes human moral reasoning into five factors, including care/harm, liberty/oppression, and sanctity/degradation (Graham et al., 2009). People vary in the weight they place on these dimensions when making moral decisions, in part due to their cultural upbringing and political ideology. As large language models (LLMs) are trained on datasets collected from the internet, they may reflect the biases that are present in such corpora. This paper uses MFT as a lens to analyze whether popular LLMs have acquired a bias towards a particular set of moral values. We analyze known LLMs and find they exhibit particular moral foundations, and show how these relate to human moral foundations and political affiliations. We also measure the consistency of these biases, or whether they vary strongly depending on the context of how the model is prompted. Finally, we show that we can adversarially select prompts that encourage the moral to exhibit a particular set of moral foundations, and that this can affect the model’s behavior on downstream tasks. These findings help illustrate the potential risks and unintended consequences of LLMs assuming a particular moral stance.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.982
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
17737–17752
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.982
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.emnlp-main.982
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Marwa Abdulhai, Gregory Serapio-García, Clement Crepy, Daria Valter, John Canny, and Natasha Jaques. 2024. Moral Foundations of Large Language Models. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 17737–17752, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Moral Foundations of Large Language Models (Abdulhai et al., EMNLP 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.982.pdf