Multi-Persona Thinking for Bias Mitigation in Large Language Models

Yuxing Chen, Guoqing Luo, Zijun Wu, Lili Mou


Abstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit social biases, which can lead to harmful stereotypes and unfair outcomes. We propose Multi-Persona Thinking (MPT), a simple inference-time framework that reduces social bias by encouraging reasoning from multiple perspectives. MPT guides the model to consider contrasting social identities, such as male and female, together with a neutral viewpoint. These viewpoints then interact through an iterative reasoning process to identify and correct biased judgments. This design transforms the potential weakness of persona assignment into a mechanism to mitigate bias. We evaluate MPT on two widely used bias benchmarks with both open-source and closed-source models. Our results show that MPT achieves a lower bias than the existing prompting-based methods while maintaining the core reasoning ability.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-acl.1389
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, United States
Editors:
Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
Venue:
Findings
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
27895–27909
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.1389/
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Cite (ACL):
Yuxing Chen, Guoqing Luo, Zijun Wu, and Lili Mou. 2026. Multi-Persona Thinking for Bias Mitigation in Large Language Models. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026, pages 27895–27909, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Multi-Persona Thinking for Bias Mitigation in Large Language Models (Chen et al., Findings 2026)
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