Undesirable Dispositions from Human Data

"Undesirable Dispositions from Human Data. It is well-understood that models trained on human data – such as being pre-trained on human-written text or fine-tuned on human feedback – can exhibit human biases. For these reasons, there has already been considerable attention to measuring biases related to protected characteristics such as sex and ethnicity (e.g., Ferrara, 2023; Liang et al., 2021; Nadeem et al., 2020; Nangia et al., 2020), which can be amplified in multi-agent settings (Acerbi & Stubbersfield, 2023, see also Case Study 7). More recently, there has been increasing attention paid to the measurement of human-like cognitive biases as well (Itzhak et al., 2023; Jones & Steinhardt, 2022; Mazeika et al., 2025; Talboy & Fuller, 2023). Some of these biases and patterns of human thought could reduce the risks of conflict while others could make it worse. For example, the tendencies to mistakenly believe that interactions are zero-sum (sometimes referred to as “fixed-pie error”) and to make self- serving judgements as to what is fair (Caputo, 2013) are known to impede negotiation. Other human tendencies like vengefulness (Jackson et al., 2019) may worsen conflict (L ̈owenheim & Heimann, 2008)."