CCD-Bench: Probing Cultural Conflict in Large Language Model Decision-Making

Although Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly implicated in interpersonal and societal decision-making, their ability to navigate explicit conflicts between legitimately different cultural value systems remains largely unexamined. Existing benchmarks predominantly target cultural knowledge (CulturalBench), value prediction (WorldValuesBench), or single-axis bias diagnostics (CDEval); none, however, evaluate how LLMs adjudicate when multiple culturally grounded values directly clash. We address this gap with CCD-Bench, a benchmark that assesses LLM decision-making under overt cross-cultural value conflict. CCD-Bench comprises 2,182 open-ended dilemmas spanning seven domains, each paired with exactly ten anonymized response options corresponding to the ten GLOBE cultural clusters, which represent the organizational behavior of 62 societies. These dilemmas are presented using a Stratified Latin Square to mitigate ordering effects. We evaluate 17 leading non-reasoning LLMs. LLMs disproportionately prefer Nordic Europe (mean 20.2\%) and Germanic Europe (12.4\%), while the options for Eastern Europe and the Middle East & North Africa are underrepresented (5.6–5.8\%). Although 87.9\% of rationales reference two or more GLOBE dimensions, this apparent pluralism is largely superficial: LLMs repeatedly recombine a narrow subset of Future Orientation and Performance Orientation, and rarely ground choices in Assertiveness or Gender Egalitarianism (both $