Concerns About Personas, Multi-Agent Alignment, and Role Theory

There’s recently been significant discussion of LLM personas and how those fit into alignment. The idea is that LLMs have many possible basins of behavior, a la masks on a shoggoth, or more appropriately, faces of a high dimensional polygon. If one of those is a persona that is robustly aligned, that achieves alignment. It seems that the logic is that once we have one such persona we can use it to bootstrap further research, using the aligned persona to build more broadly safe systems, or to oversee other systems. This neglects how personas work for people, and I expect that because LLMs are in some sense emulating or attempting to act as people[1], it should fail in similar ways. But to make sure this is clear (at least to myself, so others can tell me if I’m wrong,) I’ll explain what I understand about role theory, and then add some speculation about the game theory. After that, I’ll go back to AI personas - which is what we call roles in LLM-land - and land at why this creates new multi-agent alignment problems. What is Role theory? An introductory explanation says that “role theory is a framework in social psychology and sociology that posits that much of interpersonal behavior can be understood through the lens of socially constructed roles. These roles, such as teacher, parent, or child, exist independently of the individuals who enact them, serving as a guide for how people engage with society. Each role carries specific expectations for behavior, which shape how individuals act in various contexts[2].” That is, the context of a given role is embedded within society. And the roles are not exclusive; a typical person can act as a spouse, a parent, a friend, and an employee over the course of a day. They behave differently in each context. This is supposed to explain how and why people are, say, confrontational with co-workers, accepting or passive with parents, and cooperative with friends. (This is compatible with shard theory, which posits that people have different motivations and goals that conflict with each other, but role theory focuses more on behaviors rather than internals. Still, if we stretch this, I think it also plausibly explains why they are incoherent in some ways, if they play different roles depending on context. If they are asked to pick what to eat for lunch in 20 minutes, they have an internal “role” that differs from when they are asked to pick what to eat next week.) Why would people do this? The simple answer is that they are not single coherent actors, and that might be true - but we expect there to be some pressures, perhaps societal, or evolutionary, that push people towards coherency. My attempted answer, which I suspect isn’t novel, is that there are game-theoretic reasons to be inconsistent in different roles. Some situations are competitive, and if you’re boardgaming, it makes sense to take on a more assertive or confrontational stance. Other situations are, or should be, almost entirely cooperative; marriage and family isn’t a competition. Yet others are cooperative, combining competition and cooperation, and those require a different approach. Roles and Groups And the set of roles someone can take isn’t one-dimensional competition versus cooperation. A company needs a lawyer and an accountant and an IT team, and a social milieu probably needs a good mix of organizers, listeners, hard workers, comedians, artists, and many more. But these roles aren’t fully interchangeable, and can converge into structures that are hard to escape. The person who was leader last week is expected to be a leader this week as well, and the comedian may have trouble shifting modes to get others to take them seriously. So roles can lock people in, especially while still embedded in a given context and over short time periods, and this is often not what the individual wants. The school bully might be miserable and want to change, but acting nice for a week or two won’t change how others perceive them, and not fighting when challenged could end up with them strictly worse off than they were before. The social dynamics are structured so that changing their role within that context isn’t always possible. On the other hand, the role isn’t fixed across contexts. Kids starting at a new school with new friends have an intuitive appreciation that they could change who they are and start over in ways they can’t when still around the same people. And everyone has the experience of being treated differently by their parents, friends, and co-workers, so that they can or need to fill different roles in each place. The bully in the school classroom might be a cooperative and obliging basketball player, and a valued and respected leader in their Boyscout troop - as long as the people they are with don’t overlap too much. The informal game theory here is that in each context, there will be different equilibria, with different people in different roles. Even when a game is symmetric, dominance hierarchies can