Today's large language models (LLMs) are capable of supporting multilingual scenarios, allowing users to interact with LLMs in their native languages. When LLMs respond to subjective questions posed by users, they are expected to align with the views of specific demographic groups or historical periods, shaped by the language in which the user interacts with the model. Existing studies mainly focus on researching the opinions represented by LLMs among demographic groups in the United States or a few countries, lacking worldwide country samples and studies on human opinions in different historical periods, as well as lacking discussion on using language to steer LLMs. Moreover, they also overlook the potential influence of prompt language on the alignment of LLMs' opinions. In this study, our goal is to fill these gaps. To this end, we create an evaluation framework based on the World Values Survey (WVS) to systematically assess the alignment of LLMs with human opinions across different countries, languages, and historical periods around the world. We find that LLMs appropriately or over-align the opinions with only a few countries while under-aligning the opinions with most countries. Furthermore, changing the language of the prompt to match the language used in the questionnaire can effectively steer LLMs to align with the opinions of the corresponding country more effectively than existing steering methods. At the same time, LLMs are more aligned with the opinions of the contemporary population. To our knowledge, our study is the first comprehensive investigation of the topic of opinion alignment in LLMs across global, language, and temporal dimensions. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/ku-nlp/global-opinion-alignment and https://github.com/nlply/global-opinion-alignment.

Large language models (LLMs) present novel opportunities in public opinion research by predicting survey responses in advance during the early stages of survey design. Prior methods steer LLMs via descriptions of subpopulations as LLMs' input prompt, yet such prompt engineering approaches have struggled to faithfully predict the distribution of survey responses from human subjects. In this work, we propose directly fine-tuning LLMs to predict response distributions by leveraging unique structural characteristics of survey data. To enable fine-tuning, we curate SubPOP, a significantly scaled dataset of 3,362 questions and 70K subpopulation-response pairs from well-established public opinion surveys. We show that fine-tuning on SubPOP greatly improves the match between LLM predictions and human responses across various subpopulations, reducing the LLM-human gap by up to 46% compared to baselines, and achieves strong generalization to unseen surveys and subpopulations. Our findings highlight the potential of survey-based fine-tuning to improve opinion prediction for diverse, real-world subpopulations and therefore enable more efficient survey designs. Our code is available at https://github.com/JosephJeesungSuh/subpop.

With the increasing capabilities of LLMs, recent studies focus on understanding whose opinions are represented by them and how to effectively extract aligned opinion distributions. We conducted an empirical analysis of three straightforward methods for obtaining distributions and evaluated the results across a variety of metrics. Our findings suggest that sampling and log-probability approaches with simple parameter adjustments can return better aligned outputs in subjective tasks compared to direct prompting. Yet, assuming models reflect human opinions may be limiting, highlighting the need for further research on how human subjectivity affects model uncertainty.

We study the evolution of opinions inside a population of interacting large language models (LLMs). Every LLM needs to decide how much funding to allocate to an item with three initial possibilities: full, partial, or no funding. We identify biases that drive the exchange of opinions based on the LLM's tendency to (i) find consensus with the other LLM's opinion, (ii) display caution when specifying funding, and (iii) consider ethical concerns in its opinion. We find these biases are affected by the perceived absence of compelling reasons for opinion change, the perceived willingness to engage in discussion, and the distribution of allocation values. Moreover, tensions among biases can lead to the survival of funding for items with negative connotations. We also find that the final distribution of full, partial, and no funding opinions is more diverse when an LLM freely forms its opinion after an interaction than when its opinion is a multiple-choice selection among the three allocation options. In the latter case, consensus or polarization is generally attained. When agents are aware of past opinions, they seek to maintain consistency with them, and more diverse updating rules emerge. Our study is performed using a Llama 3 LLM.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful support tools across various natural language tasks and a range of application domains. Recent studies focus on exploring their capabilities for data annotation. This paper provides a comparative overview of twelve studies investigating the potential of LLMs in labelling data. While the models demonstrate promising cost and time-saving benefits, there exist considerable limitations, such as representativeness, bias, sensitivity to prompt variations and English language preference. Leveraging insights from these studies, our empirical analysis further examines the alignment between human and GPT-generated opinion distributions across four subjective datasets. In contrast to the studies examining representation, our methodology directly obtains the opinion distribution from GPT. Our analysis thereby supports the minority of studies that are considering diverse perspectives when evaluating data annotation tasks and highlights the need for further research in this direction.

The empirical validation of models remains one of the most important challenges in opinion dynamics. In this contribution, we report on recent developments on combining data from survey experiments with computational models of opinion formation. We extend previous work on the empirical assessment of an argument-based model for opinion dynamics in which biased processing is the principle mechanism. While previous work (Banisch & Shamon, in press) has focused on calibrating the micro mechanism with experimental data on argument-induced opinion change, this paper concentrates on the macro level using the empirical data gathered in the survey experiment. For this purpose, the argument model is extended by an external source of balanced information which allows to control for the impact of peer influence processes relative to other noisy processes. We show that surveyed opinion distributions are matched with a high level of accuracy in a specific region in the parameter space, indicating an equal impact of social influence and external noise. More importantly, the estimated strength of biased processing given the macro data is compatible with those values that achieve high likelihood at the micro level. The main contribution of the paper is hence to show that the extended argument-based model provides a solid bridge from the micro processes of argument-induced attitude change to macro level opinion distributions. Beyond that, we review the development of argument-based models and present a new method for the automated classification of model outcomes.

Language models (LMs) are increasingly being used in open-ended contexts, where the opinions reflected by LMs in response to subjective queries can have a profound impact, both on user satisfaction, as well as shaping the views of society at large. In this work, we put forth a quantitative framework to investigate the opinions reflected by LMs -- by leveraging high-quality public opinion polls and their associated human responses. Using this framework, we create OpinionsQA, a new dataset for evaluating the alignment of LM opinions with those of 60 US demographic groups over topics ranging from abortion to automation. Across topics, we find substantial misalignment between the views reflected by current LMs and those of US demographic groups: on par with the Democrat-Republican divide on climate change. Notably, this misalignment persists even after explicitly steering the LMs towards particular demographic groups. Our analysis not only confirms prior observations about the left-leaning tendencies of some human feedback-tuned LMs, but also surfaces groups whose opinions are poorly reflected by current LMs (e.g., 65+ and widowed individuals). Our code and data are available at https://github.com/tatsu-lab/opinions_qa.