[2510.04950] Mind Your Tone: Investigating How Prompt Politeness Affects LLM Accuracy (short paper)

A study examining how prompt politeness affects LLM accuracy found that rude and very rude prompts achieved higher accuracy rates (84.8% and 84.0% respectively) compared to polite and very polite prompts (80.8% and 81.6%), contradicting earlier findings that suggested rudeness would degrade performance. The research tested ChatGPT 4o across 250 variants of 50 multiple-choice questions in mathematics, science, and history, with statistical significance confirmed through paired sample t-tests. These results suggest newer LLMs respond differently to tonal variation than previously observed, emphasizing the importance of studying pragmatic aspects of prompt engineering.

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