Walking in Others' Shoes: How Perspective-Taking Guides Large Language Models in Reducing Toxicity and Bias

Abstract: The common toxicity and societal bias in contents generated by LLMs necessitate strategies to reduce harm. Present solutions often demand white-box access to the model or substantial training, which is impractical for cutting-edge commercial LLMs. Moreover, prevailing prompting methods depend on external tool feedback and fail to simultaneously lessen toxicity and bias. Motivated by social psychology principles, we propose a novel strategy named \textbf{perspective-taking prompting (\textsc{PeT})} that inspires LLMs to integrate diverse human perspectives and self-regulate their responses. This self-correction mechanism can significantly diminish toxicity (up to $89\%$) and bias (up to $73\%$) in LLMs' responses. Rigorous evaluations and ablation studies are conducted on two commercial LLMs (ChatGPT and GLM) and three open-source LLMs, revealing \textsc{PeT}'s superiority in producing less harmful responses, outperforming five strong baselines.