Bias evaluation in large language models (LLMs) uses many metrics and benchmarks, but lacks a systematic way to measure agreement across bias metrics and models. As a result, improvements observed under one metric may contradict another, and model rankings may reflect benchmark-specific artifacts rather than stable bias profiles. In this work, we introduce Metric Agreement Score (MeAS) and Model Agreement Score (MoAS), which quantify cross-metric and cross-model agreement in bias rankings, respectively. We apply these measures to eight LLMs, seven bias metrics, and nine corpora. Our results reveal disagreement among both metrics and models: Contrary to expectations, we find that metrics within the same category (generation-based and probabilistic) often behave independently of each other. For instance, HONEST shows independence with toxicity metrics, and the Context Association Test shows no correlation with Language Modeling Bias metric. At the model level, DeepSeek-family models invert bias rankings relative to most others, indicating that the model family strongly shapes specific bias profiles. These findings challenge the assumption that bias mitigation is universally transferable and highlight the need for agreement-aware evaluation.

Large language models (LLMs) struggle to navigate culturally specific communication norms, limiting their effectiveness in global contexts. We focus on Persian *taarof*, a social norm in Iranian interactions, which is a sophisticated system of ritual politeness that emphasizes deference, modesty, and indirectness, yet remains absent from existing cultural benchmarks. We introduce **TaarofBench**, the first benchmark for evaluating LLM understanding of taarof, comprising 450 role-play scenarios covering 12 common social interaction topics, validated by native speakers. Our evaluation of five frontier LLMs reveals substantial gaps in cultural competence, with accuracy rates 40-48% below native speakers when taarof is culturally appropriate. Performance varies between interaction topics, improves with Persian-language prompts, and exhibits gender-based asymmetries. We also show that responses rated “polite” by standard metrics often violate taarof norms, indicating the limitations of Western politeness frameworks. Through supervised fine-tuning and Direct Preference Optimization, we achieve 21.8% and 42.3% improvement in model alignment with cultural expectations. Our human study with 33 participants (11 native Persian, 11 heritage, and 11 non-Iranian speakers) forms baselines in varying degrees of familiarity with Persian norms. This work lays the foundation for developing diverse and culturally aware LLMs, enabling applications that better navigate complex social interactions.