← 研踪 PaperTrailarXiv:2511.05766 · v2
Anchors in the Machine: Behavioral and Attributional Evidence of Anchoring Bias in LLMs
首次提交 2025-11-08 07:35
版本更新 2026-11-08 00:35
雷达观测 2026-11-10 11:14
摘要
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly studied as behavioral subjects (e.g., synthetic participants or users) and decision systems (e.g., LLM-as-a-judge), yet it remains unclear how observed cognitive biases relate to changes in model output probabilities. Anchoring bias, a classic human judgment bias, provides a useful test case. Prior research largely relies on generated responses, leaving distributional effects and input-field contributions less explored. This paper advances the study of anchoring in LLMs through three contributions: (1) a log-probability-based behavioral analysis examining how numerical anchors shift distributions over candidate outputs, using alternative questions and anchor pairs alongside a positive control to reduce reliance on potentially memorized stimuli; (2) exact Banzhaf-value attribution over structured prompt fields to quantify anchor contributions to log-probabilities; and (3) an Anchoring Bias Sensitivity Score (ABSS) integrating behavioral and attributional evidence across six open-source models. Results reveal predominantly positive behavioral anchoring effects, varying substantially across models. Gemma-2B, Phi-2, and Llama-2-7B achieve the highest ABSS rankings, whereas other models exhibit weaker behavioral-attributional alignment despite sometimes showing substantial behavioral shifts. Attributional effects also vary across prompts, indicating that behavioral anchoring does not necessarily imply stronger anchor-field contributions. These findings raise questions about LLM reliability as synthetic participants and potential vulnerabilities to numerical cues in automated evaluation and decision-making. More broadly, the framework connects behavioral science with explainable AI, particularly interpretability, and AI safety, providing a reproducible approach to investigating cognitive-bias-like effects in LLMs.
作者备注：17 pages, 5 figures, 1 table
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v2 · 2026-11-08 00:35 · 最新观测版本
Anchors in the Machine: Behavioral and Attributional Evidence of Anchoring Bias in LLMs
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly studied as behavioral subjects (e.g., synthetic participants or users) and decision systems (e.g., LLM-as-a-judge), yet it remains unclear how observed cognitive biases relate to changes in model output probabilities. Anchoring bias, a classic human judgment bias, provides a useful test case. Prior research largely relies on generated responses, leaving distributional effects and input-field contributions less explored. This paper advances the study of anchoring in LLMs through three contributions: (1) a log-probability-based behavioral analysis examining how numerical anchors shift distributions over candidate outputs, using alternative questions and anchor pairs alongside a positive control to reduce reliance on potentially memorized stimuli; (2) exact Banzhaf-value attribution over structured prompt fields to quantify anchor contributions to log-probabilities; and (3) an Anchoring Bias Sensitivity Score (ABSS) integrating behavioral and attributional evidence across six open-source models. Results reveal predominantly positive behavioral anchoring effects, varying substantially across models. Gemma-2B, Phi-2, and Llama-2-7B achieve the highest ABSS rankings, whereas other models exhibit weaker behavioral-attributional alignment despite sometimes showing substantial behavioral shifts. Attributional effects also vary across prompts, indicating that behavioral anchoring does not necessarily imply stronger anchor-field contributions. These findings raise questions about LLM reliability as synthetic participants and potential vulnerabilities to numerical cues in automated evaluation and decision-making. More broadly, the framework connects behavioral science with explainable AI, particularly interpretability, and AI safety, providing a reproducible approach to investigating cognitive-bias-like effects in LLMs.
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