Saskia Helbling

Persistent Instability in LLM's Personality Measurements: Effects of Scale, Reasoning, and Conversation History

Tommaso Tosato

Saskia Helbling

Yorguin-Jose Mantilla-Ramos

Mahmood Hegazy

Alberto Tosato

D. Lemay

Irina Rish

Guillaume Dumas

Large language models require consistent behavioral patterns for safe deployment, yet their personality-like traits remain poorly understood… (voir plus). We present PERSIST (PERsonality Stability in Synthetic Text), a comprehensive evaluation framework testing 25+ open-source models (1B-671B parameters) across 500,000+ responses. Using traditional (BFI-44, SD3) and novel LLM-adapted personality instruments, we systematically vary question order, paraphrasing, personas, and reasoning modes. Our findings challenge fundamental deployment assumptions: (1) Even 400B+ models exhibit substantial response variability (SD>0.4); (2) Minor prompt reordering alone shifts personality measurements by up to 20%; (3) Interventions expected to stabilize behavior, such as chain-of-thought reasoning, detailed personas instruction, inclusion of conversation history, can paradoxically increase variability; (4) LLM-adapted instruments show equal instability to human-centric versions, confirming architectural rather than translational limitations. This persistent instability across scales and mitigation strategies suggests current LLMs lack the foundations for genuine behavioral consistency. For safety-critical applications requiring predictable behavior, these findings indicate that personality-based alignment strategies may be fundamentally inadequate.

2025-08-06

ArXiv (prépublication)

doi.org

arxiv.org

Persistent Instability in LLM's Personality Measurements: Effects of Scale, Reasoning, and Conversation History

Tommaso Tosato

Saskia Helbling

Yorguin-Jose Mantilla-Ramos

Mahmood Hegazy

Alberto Tosato

D. Lemay

Irina Rish

Guillaume Dumas

Large language models require consistent behavioral patterns for safe deployment, yet their personality-like traits remain poorly understood… (voir plus). We present PERSIST (PERsonality Stability in Synthetic Text), a comprehensive evaluation framework testing 25+ open-source models (1B-671B parameters) across 500,000+ responses. Using traditional (BFI-44, SD3) and novel LLM-adapted personality instruments, we systematically vary question order, paraphrasing, personas, and reasoning modes. Our findings challenge fundamental deployment assumptions: (1) Even 400B+ models exhibit substantial response variability (SD>0.4); (2) Minor prompt reordering alone shifts personality measurements by up to 20%; (3) Interventions expected to stabilize behavior, such as chain-of-thought reasoning, detailed personas instruction, inclusion of conversation history, can paradoxically increase variability; (4) LLM-adapted instruments show equal instability to human-centric versions, confirming architectural rather than translational limitations. This persistent instability across scales and mitigation strategies suggests current LLMs lack the foundations for genuine behavioral consistency. For safety-critical applications requiring predictable behavior, these findings indicate that personality-based alignment strategies may be fundamentally inadequate.

2025-08-06

ArXiv (prépublication)

arxiv.org