Persona is a Double-edged Sword: Mitigating the Negative Impact of Role-playing Prompts in Zero-shot Reasoning Tasks · HackerPapers discussions

Persona is a Double-edged Sword: Mitigating the Negative Impact of Role-playing Prompts in Zero-shot Reasoning Tasks — mentioned by joshuaisaact

Sun, 25 Jan 2026 12:31:27 GMT

Fair point on the date - the paper was updated October 2024 with Llama-3 and Qwen2.5 (up to 72B), same findings. The v1 to v3 revision is interesting. They initially found personas helped, then reversed their conclusion after expanding to more models. "Comprehensively disproven" was too strong - should have said "evidence suggests the effect is largely random." There's also Gupta et al. 2024 (arxiv.org/abs/2408.08631) with similar findings if you want more data points.

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

Persona is a Double-edged Sword: Mitigating the Negative Impact of Role-playing Prompts in Zero-shot Reasoning Tasks — mentioned by electroglyph

Thu, 08 Jan 2026 23:51:22 GMT

there's actually quite a bit of research in this field, here's a couple: "ExpertPrompting: Instructing Large Language Models to be Distinguished Experts" https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.14688 "Persona is a Double-edged Sword: Mitigating the Negative Impact of Role-playing Prompts in Zero-shot Reasoning Tasks" https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.08631

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.