Moral Lenses, Political Coordinates: Towards Ideological Positioning of Morally Conditioned LLMs

Authors: C Yuan, B Ma, Z Zhang, B Prenkaj, F Kreuter, G Kasneci

Published: 2026

Publication: arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.08634, 2026•arxiv.org

This paper examines how large language models’ (LLMs) political outputs shift when you explicitly prime them with different moral values. Instead of just assigning fake personas (like “pretend to be liberal”), the authors condition models to endorse or reject specific moral values (e.g., utilitarianism, fairness, authority). They then measure how those moral primes move the models’ positions in a two-dimensional political space (economic left ↔ right and social libertarian ↔ authoritarian) us...

Institution: Munich Center for Machine Learning, LMU Munich, Technical University of Munich

Research Area: Artificial Intelligence, AI Ethics, AI Alignment, Political Science, Computational Social Science

Discipline: Computer Science, Natural Language Processing (NLP)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2601.08634