Can LLMs Express Personality Across Cultures? Introducing CulturalPersonas for Evaluating Trait Alignment
Journal:
arXiv
Published Date:
Jun 6, 2025
Abstract
As LLMs become central to interactive applications, ranging from tutoring to
mental health, the ability to express personality in culturally appropriate
ways is increasingly important. While recent works have explored personality
evaluation of LLMs, they largely overlook the interplay between culture and
personality. To address this, we introduce CulturalPersonas, the first
large-scale benchmark with human validation for evaluating LLMs' personality
expression in culturally grounded, behaviorally rich contexts. Our dataset
spans 3,000 scenario-based questions across six diverse countries, designed to
elicit personality through everyday scenarios rooted in local values. We
evaluate three LLMs, using both multiple-choice and open-ended response
formats. Our results show that CulturalPersonas improves alignment with
country-specific human personality distributions (over a 20% reduction in
Wasserstein distance across models and countries) and elicits more expressive,
culturally coherent outputs compared to existing benchmarks. CulturalPersonas
surfaces meaningful modulated trait outputs in response to culturally grounded
prompts, offering new directions for aligning LLMs to global norms of behavior.
By bridging personality expression and cultural nuance, we envision that
CulturalPersonas will pave the way for more socially intelligent and globally
adaptive LLMs.
