Signal or Spurious Cue? A Randomized Audit of Survey-Country Metadata in LLM Social Inference

Title:Signal or Spurious Cue? A Randomized Audit of Survey-Country Metadata in LLM Social Inference

Abstract:Survey-country metadata can improve an LLM's forecast of an individual response when informative, yet the same cue may redirect the forecast when assigned at random. A within-record audit tests whether disclosing a random label's uniform, record-independent origin reduces its country-directed uptake, and whether verified survey country lowers held-out Brier loss. Independent population anchors and recorded human answers measure direction and consequence across five fixed API models, six countries, and seven development-selected targets. In the primary post-review 72-record panel, opaque and disclosed-random labels each produced country-direction shifts of 0.214. Paired attenuation was 0.0003 (95% CI [-0.0157, 0.0166]). Verified country reduced Brier loss by 0.040 (95% CI [0.024, 0.056]), while random-label regret included zero. A non-overlapping mixed-coverage consistency panel retained positive disclosed-random movement and verified utility, while attenuation remained uncertain. On the selected targets, verified metadata was useful in both panels, but disclosure did not reliably attenuate random-label uptake. PROV-FORECAST contains 14,400 paired item-level probability distributions from the corrected panel.

Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2608.06085 [cs.AI]

(or arXiv:2608.06085v1 [cs.AI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.06085 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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