Submission 168
Multilingual Large Language Models and Cultural Diversity: Evidence from Civic and Moral Judgments
panel.5-223 - Floor 1-02
Presented by: Eugenio Vicario
Multilingual large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed across linguistic and cultural contexts, raising the question of whether multilingual interaction preserves cultural diversity in moral judgments. We compare civic and moral evaluations generated by a multilingual LLM across multiple languages with population-level data from the World Values Survey and the European Values Study. Although the model exhibits meaningful linguistic variability, this does not translate into the preservation of cross-national moral diversity. Alignment between model-generated judgments and population-level values is highest for English-speaking and Western European countries and substantially weaker elsewhere. At the cross-national level, the LLM induces a selective and asymmetric reconfiguration of moral distances, primarily reducing distances between WEIRD and non-WEIRD countries while leaving within-group distances largely unchanged. These patterns are strongly domain-dependent: anti-civic norms display a pronounced norm-enforcing bias with minimal cross-national variation, personal and bioethical judgments cluster around values typical of WEIRD countries, and political violence exhibits increased dispersion rather than convergence. Together, these findings suggest that multilingual LLMs act as normative infrastructures that reshape moral representations in uneven and domain-specific ways, highlighting the limits of multilingual fluency as a guarantee of cultural alignment.