Shav Vimalendiran
Author directory2026
Cultural Alignment of Open-Weight LLMs on the Inglehart–Welzel Map
Shav Vimalendiran
The Proceedings of the Workshop on Open Reasoning Across Cultures Languages (ORACLE)
Shav Vimalendiran
The Proceedings of the Workshop on Open Reasoning Across Cultures Languages (ORACLE)
Large language models increasingly mediate information and decisions across culturally diverse societies, raising questions about whose values their responses reflect. We examine whether geographic diversity among developers translates into cultural diversity in model responses. We administer the ten Integrated Values Surveys items defining the Inglehart– Welzel cultural map to 17 frontier open-weight models from Chinese and Western developers in English and Chinese, yielding 17,000 trials. An audited projection compares their responses with 109 countries and territories. On the primary map, 30 of 33 eligible model– language means are nearest a Western regional centroid. Under English administration, all 17 models give more permissive mean answers on homosexuality and abortion than the pooled human-survey mean. Chinese-language administration moves 15 of 16 paired models toward greater self-expression and increases both origin groups’ mean distance from the Confucian centroid; all 16 eligible Chinese-language means are nearest the Protestant European centroid. Origin differences nevertheless persist: Chinese-origin models are closer to the Confucian centroid than Western-origin models under English administration. The models thus exhibit predominantly Western-region proximity across developer origins, alongside differences within a restricted part of the cultural map.