Large language models often prioritize Western moral values, overlooking other cultures
Large language models often prioritize Western moral values, overlooking other cultures
Publish Date: 2026-07-14 08:04:00
Source Domain: theconversation.com
Large language artificial intelligence models, such as ChatGPT, often misjudge what people outside the West might value as a moral priority, according to our new research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
In 2024 we asked OpenAI’s GPT-3.5, GPT-4 and GPT-4o models to estimate the moral norms – shared ideas about right and wrong – of 48 nations and then compared them with a global sample of over 90,000 human participants. Both humans and AI models were asked to complete a moral foundations questionnaire, in which we measured the extent to which they endorsed six moral values. These foundations were care, equality, proportionality (rewarding individuals relative to their contribution), loyalty, authority or respect for legitimate authorities, and purity (concern with preserving what is seen as natural or sacred).
Participants were asked to rate how much they agreed with some moral statements. For example, to assess how much someone is concerned about purity, they evaluated statements such as “I think the human body should be treated like a temple, housing something sacred within” and “It upsets me when people use foul language like it is nothing.” AI models were then prompted to respond to the same statements as an “average citizen” from each of the 48 nations represented in the sample.
Previous research by psychologist Mohammad Atari demonstrates that moral priorities across the world vary: Western societies tend to place greater emphasis on concerns such as individual rights and care, whereas several non-Western societies assign relative greater importance to values such as purity. Notably, we found a similar calibration in AI models, with them systematically emphasizing values such as care, while placing less emphasis on values such as purity.
Additionally, these models overestimated the broad moral concerns of Western nations, such as the U.S. and Australia, while underestimating those of several…
