Social Desirability

Social desirability bias, the tendency to present oneself in a favorable light, is a significant concern in psychological research and is now being actively investigated in the context of large language models (LLMs). Current research focuses on detecting and quantifying this bias in LLMs like GPT-3, GPT-4, and others, using personality assessments and analyzing the impact of training data on agent behavior. These findings highlight the limitations of using LLMs as proxies for human participants and underscore the need for methods to mitigate this bias in AI systems to ensure reliable and unbiased results in various applications. The implications extend to the broader trustworthiness and ethical considerations of AI in social science research and beyond.