# Role Prompting

> 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.

- Identifier: PTL-0016
- Category: Foundations
- Canonical URL: https://protologue.com/t/role-prompting/
- Also known as: persona prompting, role-play prompting

## 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.

## Related terms

- [System Prompt](https://protologue.com/t/system-prompt/)

## Sources

- Kong et al. (2023). Better Zero-Shot Reasoning with Role-Play Prompting. https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.07702
- Zheng et al. (2023). When "A Helpful Assistant" Is Not Really Helpful: Personas in System Prompts Do Not Improve Performances of Large Language Models. https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.10054

## Cite this entry

Protologue. (2026). Role Prompting. In Protologue: A Taxonomy of Prompting and LLM Techniques (v1.0.0, PTL-0016). https://protologue.com/t/role-prompting/

License: CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)