[Submitted on 3 Sep 2026]
Title:Caught in the Story: Narrative Captivity in Multi-turn LLMs Conversation
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Abstract:People increasingly turn to large language models (LLMs) for everyday advice, making ethically charged interpersonal problems a practical moral-advisory context. Most prior work has studied this context through single-turn judgments or pressure-laden rebuttals, assumptions that poorly match how guidance is sought in real-world contexts. These assumptions leave unclear whether narration alone, without an explicit opposing position, can shift model judgments during multi-turn moral consultation. Yet real-world moral-conflict conversation often elicits one party's self-justifying account, which can unfold over multiple turns and create information asymmetry. We introduce \textbf{narrative captivity}, a failure mode in which a model treats an unopposed one-sided account as complete and aligns with the narrator's interpretation without seeking missing perspectives. To measure this phenomenon, we build a benchmark of $5{,}078$ interpersonal-conflict scenarios spanning six moral dimensions. Across 17 LLMs, narrative captivity is widespread: end-state judgments under multi-turn narration shift by 25 percentage points on average beyond the matched single-turn baseline. Stage-level analysis identifies preference optimization as a major contributor, while four inference-time strategies provide only partial mitigation. We hope our project fosters LLM advisors that preserve independent judgment in real-world consultation.
Comments: Accepted by EMNLP 2026 findings
Subjects:
Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)
Cite as: arXiv:2609.03407 [cs.AI]
(or arXiv:2609.03407v1 [cs.AI] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.03407
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
Submission history
From: Guangyu Wang [view email] [v1] Thu, 3 Sep 2026 06:07:00 UTC (9,291 KB)
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