Value-Action Alignment in Large Language Models under Privacy-Prosocial Conflict
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to simulate decision-making tasks involving personal data sharing, where privacy concerns and prosocial motivations can push choices in opposite directions. Existing evaluations often measure privacy-related attitudes or sharing intentions in isolation, which makes it difficult to determine whether a model's expressed values jointly predict its downstream data-sharing actions as in real human behaviors. We introduce a context-based assessment protocol that sequentially administers standardized questionnaires for privacy attitudes, prosocialness, and acceptance of data sharing within a bounded, history-carrying session. To evaluate value-action alignments under competing attitudes, we use multi-group structural equation modeling (MGSEM) to identify relations from privacy concerns and prosocialness to data sharing. We propose Value-Action Alignment Rate (VAAR), a human-referenced directional agreement metric that aggregates path-level evidence for expected signs. Across multiple LLMs, we observe stable but model-specific Privacy-PSA-AoDS profiles, and substantial heterogeneity in value-action alignment.
Source: arXiv (Cornell University)
Authors: Chen, Guanyu, Yu, Chenxiao, Hu, Xiyang
Institutions: Arizona State University, University of Southern California
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7119478199
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