Value–Action Alignment in Large Language Models under Privacy–Prosocial Conflict

Guanyu Chen, Chenxiao Yu, Xiyang Hu


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.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-acl.2065
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:
41545–41564
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.2065/
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Cite (ACL):
Guanyu Chen, Chenxiao Yu, and Xiyang Hu. 2026. Value–Action Alignment in Large Language Models under Privacy–Prosocial Conflict. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026, pages 41545–41564, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Value–Action Alignment in Large Language Models under Privacy–Prosocial Conflict (Chen et al., Findings 2026)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.2065.pdf
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