Tracing Moral Foundations in Large Language Models
arXiv:2601.05437v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) often produce human-like moral judgments, but it is unclear whether this reflects an internal conceptual structure or superficial “moral mimicry.” Using Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) as an analytic framework, we study how moral foundations are encoded, organized, and expressed within two instruction-tuned LLMs: Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct and Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct. We employ a multi-level approach combining (i) layer-wise analysis of MFT concept representations and their alignment with human moral perceptions, (ii) pretrained sparse […]