Mind Your Tone: Investigating How Prompt Politeness Affects LLM Accuracy (short paper)
Summary
A short arXiv paper investigates how prompt politeness affects LLM accuracy. By creating 50 base questions across math, science, and history and rewriting them into five tone variants (Very Polite to Very Rude), the study finds impolite prompts yield higher accuracy (80.8% to 84.8%), challenging prior assumptions about politeness improving performance and highlighting pragmatic aspects of human-AI interaction.