What’s the most important value? INVP: INvestigating the Value Priorities of LLMs through Decision-making in Social Scenarios

Xuelin Liu, Pengyuan Liu, Dong Yu


Abstract
As large language models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive performance in various tasks and are increasingly integrated into the decision-making process, ensuring they align with human values has become crucial. This paper highlights that value priorities—the relative importance of different value—play a pivotal role in the decision-making process. To explore the value priorities in LLMs, this paper introduces INVP, a framework for INvestigating Value Priorities through decision-making in social scenarios. The framework encompasses social scenarios including binary decision-making, covering both individual and collective decision-making contexts, and is based on Schwartz’s value theory for constructing value priorities. Using this framework, we construct a dataset, which contains a total of 1613 scenarios and 3226 decisions across 283 topics. We evaluate seven popular LLMs and the experimental results reveal commonalities in the value priorities across different LLMs, such as an emphasis on Universalism and Benevolence, while Power and Hedonism are typically given lower priority. This study provides fresh insights into understanding and enhancing the moral and value alignment of LLMs when making complex social decisions.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.317
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4725–4752
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.317/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xuelin Liu, Pengyuan Liu, and Dong Yu. 2025. What’s the most important value? INVP: INvestigating the Value Priorities of LLMs through Decision-making in Social Scenarios. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 4725–4752, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
What’s the most important value? INVP: INvestigating the Value Priorities of LLMs through Decision-making in Social Scenarios (Liu et al., COLING 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.317.pdf