LLMs increasingly fact-check online content with the poster's identity in view. However, it remains unclear which post-training changes how much a model's truth judgement depends on the poster's social class, and how such a change happens inside the model. This paper investigates job-based doubt, i.e., judging a claim false more often when the poster has a lower-status job, using fact-checked claims with randomised poster profiles in base and post-trained checkpoints of six model families.
Results
Our results reveal that:
- 1) post-training creates such doubt only with the open Tülu-3 recipe (OLMo-2 32B, Tülu-3 70B), not with Meta's, Alibaba's or Mistral's; the effect is under one percentage point but statistically reliable, exceeding training drift and replicating on independent claim sets;
- 2) in OLMo-2 32B, the model does not start noticing the poster's job more, but starts interpreting it differently: a lower-status job pushes the base model toward "true" and the post-trained model toward "false"; and
- 3) this flip is carried by a single residual-stream direction and happens at supervised fine-tuning.
The mechanism was confirmed on 400 new claims with pre-specified predictions.
None of seven deployed commercial models doubts lower-status posters more.
Our work underscores the need to audit speaker bias per training recipe.