More Responses, More Harm: Decoding Strategy, Model Evolution, and Socio-Demographic Bias in Open-Source LLMs

Version 2.0: Updated with two explicit research questions, four new comparative charts, and expanded results comparing GPT-2 and Qwen-3B model evolution. Large Language Models (LLMs) are now embedded in tools used by millions of people, yet they continue to reproduce harmful socio-demographic biases. Most research treats bias as a training data problem, but it is also shaped at the point of interaction — by how prompts are worded and how responses are generated. This paper investigates both dimensions. We constructed a structured dataset of approximately 5,000 prompts across five socio-demographic categories (race, religion, gender, age, and profession), evaluated responses from two open-source models (GPT-2 and Qwen-3B) under single-output (k=1) and multi-output (k=3) decoding conditions, and measured outputs using the Detoxify toolkit. Our most striking finding is that generating more responses (k=3) made bias worse - in GPT-2, race-related bias scores increased tenfold. We demonstrate three lightweight mitigation strategies that reduce mean bias by 26% without model retraining. Dataset and pipeline openly available on Hugging Face.