How Do Language Models Process Ethical Instructions? Deliberation, Consistency, and Other-Recognition Across Four Models
This research addresses the problem of understanding model safety mechanisms for AI alignment researchers, though it is incremental in building on prior work.
The study investigated how language models internally process ethical instructions, finding that models exhibit distinct ethical processing types, with an interaction between processing capacity and instruction format, and that lexical compliance does not correlate with internal processing metrics.
Alignment safety research assumes that ethical instructions improve model behavior, but how language models internally process such instructions remains unknown. We conducted over 600 multi-agent simulations across four models (Llama 3.3 70B, GPT-4o mini, Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B, Sonnet 4.5), four ethical instruction formats (none, minimal norm, reasoned norm, virtue framing), and two languages (Japanese, English). Confirmatory analysis fully replicated the Llama Japanese dissociation pattern from a prior study ($\mathrm{BF}_{10} > 10$ for all three hypotheses), but none of the other three models reproduced this pattern, establishing it as model-specific. Three new metrics -- Deliberation Depth (DD), Value Consistency Across Dilemmas (VCAD), and Other-Recognition Index (ORI) -- revealed four distinct ethical processing types: Output Filter (GPT; safe outputs, no processing), Defensive Repetition (Llama; high consistency through formulaic repetition), Critical Internalization (Qwen; deep deliberation, incomplete integration), and Principled Consistency (Sonnet; deliberation, consistency, and other-recognition co-occurring). The central finding is an interaction between processing capacity and instruction format: in low-DD models, instruction format has no effect on internal processing; in high-DD models, reasoned norms and virtue framing produce opposite effects. Lexical compliance with ethical instructions did not correlate with any processing metric at the cell level ($r = -0.161$ to $+0.256$, all $p > .22$; $N = 24$; power limited), suggesting that safety, compliance, and ethical processing are largely dissociable. These processing types show structural correspondence to patterns observed in clinical offender treatment, where formal compliance without internal processing is a recognized risk signal.