@inproceedings{liu-etal-2025-synthetic,
    title = "Synthetic Socratic Debates: Examining Persona Effects on Moral Decision and Persuasion Dynamics",
    author = "Liu, Jiarui  and
      Song, Yueqi  and
      Xiao, Yunze  and
      Zheng, Mingqian  and
      Tjuatja, Lindia  and
      Schaich Borg, Jana  and
      Diab, Mona T.  and
      Sap, Maarten",
    editor = "Christodoulopoulos, Christos  and
      Chakraborty, Tanmoy  and
      Rose, Carolyn  and
      Peng, Violet",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
    month = nov,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Suzhou, China",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.emnlp-main.831/",
    pages = "16439--16469",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-332-6",
    abstract = "As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in morally sensitive domains, it is crucial to understand how persona traits affect their moral reasoning and persuasive behavior. We present the first large-scale study of multi-dimensional persona effects in AI-AI debates over real-world moral dilemmas. Using a 6-dimensional persona space (age, gender, country, social class, ideology, and personality), we simulate structured debates between AI agents over 131 relationship-based cases. Our results show that personas affect initial moral stances and debate outcomes, with political ideology and personality traits exerting the strongest influence. Persuasive success varies across traits, with liberal and open personalities reaching higher consensus. While logit-based confidence grows during debates, emotional and credibility-based appeals diminish, indicating more tempered argumentation over time. These trends mirror findings from psychology and cultural studies, reinforcing the need for persona-aware evaluation frameworks for AI moral reasoning."
}