Haowen Zheng
Author directory2026
Truth or Tribe: How In-group Favoritism Prioritize Facts in Persona Agents
Shijun Lei | Hongyu Wang | Yunji Liang | Haowen Zheng | Bin Guo | Zhiwen Yu
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Shijun Lei | Hongyu Wang | Yunji Liang | Haowen Zheng | Bin Guo | Zhiwen Yu
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
In-group favoritism refers to the phenomenon of favoring members of one’s in-group over out-group members and is widely observed in numerous social cooperative behaviors. Recently, in-group favoritism biases have also been identified in generative language models. However, whether persona agents exhibit in-group favoritism when faced with conflicting information, including misinformation, and how to mitigate its adverse effects remain understudied. To address these problems, we propose a Truth or Tribe simulation framework to study agent cooperation in the spread of conflicting information through a triadic interaction paradigm, and conduct controlled trials to evaluate the primary moderating factors. Extensive results showcase that persona agents display strong in-group favoritism, accepting incorrect answers from identity-similar peers at much higher rates than from dissimilar peers. In-group favoritism continues to emerge in defeasible reasoning contexts where no absolute truth exists, and it intensifies as cognitive complexity increases. Furthermore, three intervention strategies—Identity-Blind Instruction, Structured Counterfactual Reasoning, and Heterogeneous Perspective Ensemble—are proposed to mitigate in-group favoritism.