Moral Susceptibility and Robustness under Persona Role-Play in Large Language Models

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly operate in social contexts, motivating analysis of how they express and shift moral judgments. In this work, we investigate the moral response of LLMs to persona role-play, prompting a LLM to assume a specific character. Using the Moral Foundations Questionnaire (MFQ), we introduce a benchmark that quantifies two properties: moral susceptibility and moral robustness, defined from the variability of MFQ scores across- and within-personas. We estimate these quantities with two complementary procedures, repeated sampling and a logit-based method that directly estimates the rating distributions and enables temperature analysis. We evaluate 15 models across six families: Claude, DeepSeek, Gemini, GPT, Grok, and Llama. The two metrics show qualitatively different patterns. Moral robustness varies by more than an order of magnitude, with a coefficient of variation of about $152\%$, and is explained almost entirely by model family. The Claude family is, by a significant margin, the most robust, about 30 times more so than the lower-performing families (DeepSeek, Grok, and Llama), while Gemini and GPT occupy an intermediate tier. This strong family dependence suggests that robustness is primarily shaped by post-training. Moral susceptibility, by contrast, spans a much narrower range, with a coefficient of variation of about $13\%$, and the most susceptible model is only 1.6 times more susceptible than the least. Unlike robustness, susceptibility shows no clear family dependence, suggesting that it is primarily determined by pre-training. Additionally, we present moral foundation profiles for models without persona role-play and for personas averaged across models. Together, these analyses provide a systematic view of how persona conditioning shapes moral behavior in LLMs and a window into the internal machinery they use to instantiate personas.