{
  "id": "role-prompting",
  "code": "PTL-0016",
  "term": "Role Prompting",
  "aliases": [
    "persona prompting",
    "role-play prompting"
  ],
  "category": "foundations",
  "definition": "Role prompting assigns the model a persona or professional role, such as \"You are an experienced tax accountant,\" to shape its tone, vocabulary, and focus.",
  "description": "Role prompts reliably change style and framing. Evidence that they improve factual accuracy is mixed, with some studies finding gains in reasoning tasks and a large evaluation finding that adding personas to system prompts did not consistently improve performance.",
  "example": null,
  "broader": [],
  "narrower": [],
  "related": [
    "system-prompt"
  ],
  "introduced": null,
  "sources": [
    {
      "title": "Better Zero-Shot Reasoning with Role-Play Prompting",
      "authors": "Kong et al.",
      "year": 2023,
      "url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.07702"
    },
    {
      "title": "When \"A Helpful Assistant\" Is Not Really Helpful: Personas in System Prompts Do Not Improve Performances of Large Language Models",
      "authors": "Zheng et al.",
      "year": 2023,
      "url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.10054"
    }
  ],
  "url": "https://protologue.com/t/role-prompting/",
  "citation": "Protologue. (2026). Role Prompting. In Protologue: A Taxonomy of Prompting and LLM Techniques (v1.0.0, PTL-0016). https://protologue.com/t/role-prompting/"
}