Conflict and Congruency Effects in Large Language Models: In-Weight and In-Context Competition in a Verbal Conflict Task

Congruency effects, observed in conflict tasks such as Stroop and flanker tasks, have been investigated for nearly a century in psychology and neuroscience, but their mechanistic basis is not fully understood. We introduce a verbal-only LLM conflict task in which a prompt stem elicits a default same-color completion and an explicit rule either agrees with (congruent condition) or conflicts with (incongruent condition) the completion. Gemma-2-2B and six Pythia models ranging from 410M to 12B para

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ethics.ai (11 August 2026), “Conflict and Congruency Effects in Large Language Models: In-Weight and In-Context Competition in a Verbal Conflict Task,” evidence record 18804, https://ethics.ai/record/18804 (originally published by arXiv).

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