Should We Respect LLMs? A Cross-Lingual Study on the Influence of Prompt Politeness on LLM Performance

Understand

We investigate the impact of politeness levels in prompts on the performance of large language models (LLMs).

• Polite language in human communications often garners more compliance and effectiveness, while rudeness can cause aversion, impacting response quality.
• We consider that LLMs mirror human communication traits, suggesting they align with human cultural norms.
• We assess the impact of politeness in prompts on LLMs across English, Chinese, and Japanese tasks.