Truth or Tribe: How In-group Favoritism Prioritize Facts in Persona Agents

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01329v1
• Date: Sat, 02 May 2026 08:48:09 GMT
• Title: Truth or Tribe: How In-group Favoritism Prioritize Facts in Persona Agents
• Abstract summary: We show that persona agents display strong in-group favoritism, accepting incorrect answers from identity-similar peers at much higher rates than from dissimilar peers.<n>In-group favoritism continues to emerge in reasoning contexts where no absolute truth exists.<n>Three intervention strategies are proposed to mitigate the in-group favoritism.
• Score: 11.443925621424397
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: In-group favoritism refers to the phenomena of favoring members of one's in-group over out-group members and is widely observed in numerous social cooperative behaviors. Recently, in-group favoritism biases have also been identified in generative language models. However, whether the in-group favoritism exists when persona agents are faced with contradicting information (e.g., misinformation), and how to mitigate the adverse effects of in-group favoritism biases in persona agents have been understudied. To address these problems, we propose a Truth or Tribe simulation framework to study the agent cooperation within the spread of contradicting information through a triadic interaction paradigm, and conduct controlled trials to evaluate the primary moderating factors. Extensive results showcase that persona agents display strong in-group favoritism, accepting incorrect answers from identity-similar peers at much higher rates than from dissimilar peers. In-group favoritism continues to emerge in defeasible reasoning contexts where no absolute truth exists, and it intensifies as cognitive complexity increases. Furthermore, three intervention strategies--Identity-Blind Instruction, Structured Counterfactual Reasoning, and Heterogeneous Perspective Ensemble--are proposed to mitigate the in-group favoritism.

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