Live data from Hacker News

Investigating how prompt politeness affects LLM accuracy (2025)

arxiv.org

41–50 of 223 posts

Re: Investigating how prompt politeness affects LLM accuracy (2025)

#41

I have always said please and thank you to LLMs, not to increase accuracy or because I'm stupid. I believe it is more about me than about the LLM, and this is anyway a habit I don't want to lose.

Genuine question: do you add 'please' and 'thank you' to Google searches? If not, what sets them apart?

llms seem more human like so if you were to treat them badly then you are more likely to condition yourself to treat other living creatures badly.

Re: Investigating how prompt politeness affects LLM accuracy (2025)

#43
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google searches being keyword based, rather than simulated conversations? The same reason you wouldn't put in an entire actual question/sentence, unless you either don't know how to use Google, are pissed off, or have an actual reason to suspect that it would yield proper hits (e.g. looking up an excerpt).

Google has been optimized for sentence like questions so much that for a good 6+ years now it has been completely useless as keyword search. To clarify: sentence search got slightly better at the cost of keyword search. So the result is unusable garbage.

It is rather hard to lose of habit of using search engine with keywords given the change took place without much fanfare. I have no problem using sentences with the current ai tools through.

Re: Investigating how prompt politeness affects LLM accuracy (2025)

#44
post #37

I have always said please and thank you to LLMs, not to increase accuracy or because I'm stupid. I believe it is more about me than about the LLM, and this is anyway a habit I don't want to lose.

Is it worth getting worse results for that reason? From the article: "Contrary to expectations, impolite prompts consistently outperformed polite ones, with accuracy ranging from 80.8% for Very Polite prompts to 84.8% for Very Rude prompts. These findings differ from earlier studies that associated rudeness with poorer outcomes, suggesting that newer LLMs may respond differently to tonal variation. " I am not polite…

I guess it's about habit. In the end you are communicating. If I get into the habit of being rude while communicating with a machine, I would be afraid of this habit spilling over to my communication with other humans.

Re: Investigating how prompt politeness affects LLM accuracy (2025)

#45

Most of the comments here seem to be from people who haven’t even read the abstract, let alone the paper. The main result, mentioned in the abstract, is the opposite of what I would have guessed: > Contrary to expectations, impolite prompts consistently outperformed polite ones, with accuracy ranging from 80.8% for Very Polite prompts to 84.8% for Very Rude prompts. These findings differ from earlier studies that ass…

> Contrary to expectations, impolite prompts consistently outperformed polite ones, with accuracy ranging from 80.8% for Very Polite prompts to 84.8% for Very Rude prompts. These findings differ from earlier studies that associated rudeness with poorer outcomes, suggesting that newer LLMs may respond differently to tonal variation.

The expectation is naive. Even when communicating with humans, you get a better outcome when you are allowed to speak freely and directly get into argumentation than when forced to sugarcoat your tone and tone down your arguments because the "corporate culture" expects that from you.

Re: Investigating how prompt politeness affects LLM accuracy (2025)

#46
post #34

article is too old. who is using gpt-4o today?

That's a valid concern, given the paper makes clear that the effect over the polite/impolite scale seems to be model dependent (it finds the reverse correlation of earlier studies on even older models).

Re: Investigating how prompt politeness affects LLM accuracy (2025)

#47
post #37

I have always said please and thank you to LLMs, not to increase accuracy or because I'm stupid. I believe it is more about me than about the LLM, and this is anyway a habit I don't want to lose.

Is it worth getting worse results for that reason? From the article: "Contrary to expectations, impolite prompts consistently outperformed polite ones, with accuracy ranging from 80.8% for Very Polite prompts to 84.8% for Very Rude prompts. These findings differ from earlier studies that associated rudeness with poorer outcomes, suggesting that newer LLMs may respond differently to tonal variation. " I am not polite…

> Is it worth getting worse results for that reason?

> accuracy ranging from 80.8% for Very Polite prompts to 84.8% for Very Rude prompts

I can live with that, for now at least.

Re: Investigating how prompt politeness affects LLM accuracy (2025)

#49

Most of the comments here seem to be from people who haven’t even read the abstract, let alone the paper. The main result, mentioned in the abstract, is the opposite of what I would have guessed: > Contrary to expectations, impolite prompts consistently outperformed polite ones, with accuracy ranging from 80.8% for Very Polite prompts to 84.8% for Very Rude prompts. These findings differ from earlier studies that ass…

[dead]

Re: Investigating how prompt politeness affects LLM accuracy (2025)

#50

Most of the comments here seem to be from people who haven’t even read the abstract, let alone the paper. The main result, mentioned in the abstract, is the opposite of what I would have guessed: > Contrary to expectations, impolite prompts consistently outperformed polite ones, with accuracy ranging from 80.8% for Very Polite prompts to 84.8% for Very Rude prompts. These findings differ from earlier studies that ass…

> Contrary to expectations, impolite prompts consistently outperformed polite ones, with accuracy ranging from 80.8% for Very Polite prompts to 84.8% for Very Rude prompts. These findings differ from earlier studies that associated rudeness with poorer outcomes, suggesting that newer LLMs may respond differently to tonal variation. The expectation is naive. Even when communicating with humans, you get a better outcom…

Your assumption is reductive and self-absorbed. Obnoxious people have repeatedly shown to be detrimental to productivity at the organizational level. Some people are simulated by confrontation. Most people are clam up. Confrontational people think it’s more efficient because other people frequently just drop the topic and let them win, or avoid discussing things with them altogether. The obnoxious person might think that’s more efficient for the same reason my dog thinks the mailman only goes away because she barks at him. At the macro scale— which requires productive collaboration— that’s detrimental.
Post reply on HN