Analyzing and Correcting Benevolence Bias in Large Language Models
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as stand-ins for human respondents, from opinion polls and simulated survey participants to agent-based social simulations. These uses rest on one assumption: that conditioning a model on who a person is yields answers resembling those of real people from that group. Here we identify and measure benevolence bias, a small but consistent tendency for aligned LLMs to lean toward the kinder, safer, more socially approved answer on value-laden survey questions. Across 18 widely used models, four social-science datasets (ANES, GSS, WVS, and a cross-cultural prospect-theory replication) and six psychological categories, we find that the bias is a stable model property, not a quirk of any one system: it points the same way across models, grows with model size, and traces to the post-training stage. Prompt language and framing change its size but never its direction, and a "malicious persona" stress test shows a one-sided limit: aligned models struggle to play people who are less kind, less prosocial or more harm-tolerant than average. The issue is thus not only a shifted average, but a narrowed range of people the model can imitate. The bias sits in the middle of the answer distribution rather than its tails, and survives changes in sampling temperature and simple prompted reflection. The encouraging news is that it is easy to diagnose and straightforward to fix: a light-touch contrastive calibration, which needs no retraining and works on black-box APIs, brings all six categories back to the human baseline. Our results give researchers a clear map of where aligned LLMs can already be trusted as human stand-ins, where they need care, and a ready-to-use method for closing the gap.