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Spring 2026 Submitted May 2026

Whose Alignment? Comparing LLM Process Alignment Across Diverse Organizational Decision Contexts

Niklas Weller

Mentored by Emilio Barkett, Roshni Lulla

Working report from the SPAR program. May not reflect the authors' current views.

Abstract

Aligning AI systems with organizational decision-making is typically framed as a single-target problem: make the model behave like the organization. We argue this framing obscures a deeper pluralistic challenge. We rely on a decision-policy capturing method to measure process alignment: whether an LLM weights information as the organization does, not merely whether it reaches the same conclusions. Applying this method to ECHR Article 6 decisions, process alignment strongly predicts output accuracy (r = 0.85, p < .001) and externalization substantially improves alignment for poorly-aligned models. Applying it to German consumer credit decisions, this relationship collapses (r = 0.15, p = .60): interventions produce inconsistent effects and the benchmark encodes potentially discriminatory historical patterns. This contrast is itself a pluralistic alignment finding: in contested domains, high process alignment is neither achievable via externalization nor unconditionally desirable. Output agreement alone cannot distinguish a model that has internalized an organizational policy from one that merely approximates its outcomes—process-level measurement is a necessary component of any pluralistic alignment evaluation.