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arXiv · 2605.01329

Truth or Tribe: How In-group Favoritism Prioritize Facts in Persona Agents

Shijun Lei·Hongyu Wang·Yunji Liang·Haowen Zheng·Bin Guo·Zhiwen Yu
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Abstract

In-group favoritism refers to the phenomena of favoring members of one's in-group over out-group members and is widely observed in numerous social cooperative behaviors. Recently, in-group favoritism biases have also been identified in generative language models. However, whether the in-group favoritism exists when persona agents are faced with contradicting information (e.g., misinformation), and how to mitigate the adverse effects of in-group favoritism biases in persona agents have been understudied. To address these problems, we propose a Truth or Tribe simulation framework to study the agent cooperation within the spread of contradicting information through a triadic interaction paradigm, and conduct controlled trials to evaluate the primary moderating factors. Extensive results showcase that persona agents display strong in-group favoritism, accepting incorrect answers from identity-similar peers at much higher rates than from dissimilar peers. In-group favoritism continues to emerge in defeasible reasoning contexts where no absolute truth exists, and it intensifies as cognitive complexity increases. Furthermore, three intervention strategies--Identity-Blind Instruction, Structured Counterfactual Reasoning, and Heterogeneous Perspective Ensemble--are proposed to mitigate the in-group favoritism.

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Shijun Lei, Hongyu Wang, Yunji Liang, Haowen Zheng, Bin Guo, Zhiwen Yu. 2026-05-02. Truth or Tribe: How In-group Favoritism Prioritize Facts in Persona Agents. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01329

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