Metaphors We Compute By: A Computational Audit of Cultural Translation vs. Thinking in LLMs

Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly operate across culturally diverse settings, yet existing evaluations largely measure cultural behavior at the output level. We introduce CultureLens, a reference-grounded benchmark and mechanistic study of how LLMs use cultural information. CultureLens contains 9,261 scenarios across 75 countries and systematically varies country, value, true-norm, and contradictory-norm evidence. Across Llama-3.1-8B, Gemma-3-12B, and Qwen-3.5-27B, stating a contradictory norm lowers aligned answers by 32-47 percentage points, even when the model answers correctly from the country alone. Mechanistically, models default to Anglophone norms when no country is given. The failure under a contradictory norm is not one of missing knowledge, as blocking the norm inside the model restores the correct answer in most cases. Models accept a stated norm according to how it is presented and not whether it is true, which leaves them most exposed to errors in retrieved content. Supervised fine-tuning with contradictory-norm examples raises aligned answers under a contradictory norm to 85-93%, including on unseen countries, at a small cost under a true norm.

Recent work has shown that LLMs overrepresent dominant cultures, particularly Western ones, while marginalizing others. We investigate whether this affects models' ability to generate culturally adapted responses by evaluating their use of local measurement units based on the user's perceived cultural background. We introduce Cultural and Pragmatic Response Inference (CAPRI), a dataset of conversations with varying levels of cultural cues. Experiments with state-of-the-art LLMs show that models can infer cultural background and recall relevant conventions, but often fail to utilize the information to adapt their answers to the relevant cultural conventions, unless explicitly prompted to perform the tasks sequentially. We further evaluate adaptation to the interpretation of time and quantity expressions, two subjective language grounding dimensions that are affected by culture. We find that models increasingly adapt their answers as cultural cues accumulate, but their priors are not culture-neutral, sometimes aligning with the model's country of origin. Overall, CAPRI provides a resource for future research aimed at narrowing the gap between cultural knowledge and culturally adaptive language generation.

Stereotypes are subjective constructs that are mediated by the cultural context in which they are viewed. Successfully modeling them thus also requires cultural competence. When using large language models (LLMs) for stereotype-related tasks, such as their detection, it is therefore crucial that models can access relevant cultural knowledge and adjust responses accordingly. Since LLMs have shown disparities in what cultural knowledge is available to them, their capacity regarding stereotypes may also be disparate across languages and cultural contexts (e.g., for non-English languages or for non-US contexts). In this paper, we systematically investigate the effectiveness of LLMs for culture-specific stereotype detection across three factors: (1) the prompting language, (2) the instruction tuning language, and (3) the fine-tuning dataset size. We conduct experiments for US, Dutch, and Chinese cultural contexts. Our results suggest that LLMs do not reliably account for cultural contexts and overpredict the presence of stereotypes. Non-English prompts seem to improve consideration of cultural context and thus lead to more effective predictions. Moreover, we find that additional instruction tuning reduces false-positive rates and that training data size moderates detection effectiveness non-monotonically.