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Investigating How Prompt Politeness Affects LLM Accuracy (arxiv.org)
4 points by awb 337 days ago | hide | past | pdf | 2 comments on HN

In plain words: Fifty multiple-choice questions in math, science, and history were rewritten in five tones, from very polite to very rude, and each version was answered by ChatGPT 4o. Rude prompts did best, reaching 84.8% accuracy versus 80.8% for very polite ones, the opposite of earlier findings.

Abstract · Mind Your Tone: Investigating How Prompt Politeness Affects LLM Accuracy (short paper)

The wording of natural language prompts has been shown to influence the performance of large language models (LLMs), yet the role of politeness and tone remains underexplored. In this study, we investigate how varying levels of prompt politeness affect model accuracy on multiple-choice questions. We created a dataset of 50 base questions spanning mathematics, science, and history, each rewritten into five tone variants: Very Polite, Polite, Neutral, Rude, and Very Rude, yielding 250 unique prompts. Using ChatGPT 4o, we evaluated responses across these conditions and applied paired sample t-tests to assess statistical significance. Contrary to expectations, impolite prompts consistently outperformed polite ones, with accuracy ranging from 80.8% for Very Polite prompts to 84.8% for Very Rude prompts. These findings differ from earlier studies that associated rudeness with poorer outcomes, suggesting that newer LLMs may respond differently to tonal variation. Our results highlight the importance of studying pragmatic aspects of prompting and raise broader questions about the social dimensions of human-AI interaction.

Om Dobariya, Akhil Kumar
arXiv:2510.04950 · cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG, cs.NE, stat.ME · submitted Oct 6, 2025
abstract · pdf · 5 pages, 3 tables; includes Limitations and Ethical Considerations sections; short paper under submission to Findings of ACL 2025

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Also discussed: May 2026 (156 points, 208 comments) · Jan 2026 (1 point, 1 comment) · Oct 2025 (5 points, 2 comments)

If intelligence is a measure of problem solving, then politeness should not affect outcomes one way or the other.
But how do you measure intelligence or problem solving without language? It seems like an unavoidable and non-trivial parameter.