Evaluating Behavioral Alignment in Conflict Dialogue: A Multi-Dimensional Comparison of LLM Agents and Humans

Deuksin Kwon, Kaleen Shrestha, Bin Han, Elena Hayoung Lee, Gale Lucas


Abstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in socially complex, interaction-driven tasks, yet their ability to mirror human behavior in emotionally and strategically complex contexts remains underexplored. This study assesses the behavioral alignment of personality-prompted LLMs in adversarial dispute resolution by simulating multi-turn conflict dialogues that incorporate negotiation. Each LLM is guided by a matched Five-Factor personality profile to control for individual variation and enhance realism. We evaluate alignment across three dimensions: linguistic style, emotional expression (e.g., anger dynamics), and strategic behavior. GPT-4.1 achieves the closest alignment with humans in linguistic style and emotional dynamics, while Claude-3.7-Sonnet best reflects strategic behavior. Nonetheless, substantial alignment gaps persist. Our findings establish a benchmark for alignment between LLMs and humans in socially complex interactions, underscoring both the promise and the limitations of personality conditioning in dialogue modeling.
Anthology ID:
2025.emnlp-main.828
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Christos Christodoulopoulos, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Carolyn Rose, Violet Peng
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EMNLP
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
16377–16391
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.emnlp-main.828/
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Cite (ACL):
Deuksin Kwon, Kaleen Shrestha, Bin Han, Elena Hayoung Lee, and Gale Lucas. 2025. Evaluating Behavioral Alignment in Conflict Dialogue: A Multi-Dimensional Comparison of LLM Agents and Humans. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 16377–16391, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
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Evaluating Behavioral Alignment in Conflict Dialogue: A Multi-Dimensional Comparison of LLM Agents and Humans (Kwon et al., EMNLP 2025)
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