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
- Venue:
- EMNLP
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 16377–16391
- Language:
- URL:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.emnlp-main.828/
- DOI:
- 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.
- Cite (Informal):
- Evaluating Behavioral Alignment in Conflict Dialogue: A Multi-Dimensional Comparison of LLM Agents and Humans (Kwon et al., EMNLP 2025)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.emnlp-main.828.pdf