mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Social Simulacra: Creating Populated Prototypes for Social Computing Systems

arXiv 2208.04024 ↗First posted 8 Aug 2022cs.HCcited by 300

Not on the map. Why?

Cited by 113 in LLM agents and tool use, but placed by its own abstract, which didn’t fit.

Abstract (arXiv)

Social computing prototypes probe the social behaviors that may arise in an envisioned system design. This prototyping practice is currently limited to recruiting small groups of people. Unfortunately, many challenges do not arise until a system is populated at a larger scale. Can a designer understand how a social system might behave when populated, and make adjustments to the design before the system falls prey to such challenges? We introduce social simulacra, a prototyping technique that generates a breadth of realistic social interactions that may emerge when a social computing system is populated. Social simulacra take as input the designer's description of a community's design -- goal, rules, and member personas -- and produce as output an instance of that design with simulated behavior, including posts, replies, and anti-social behaviors. We demonstrate that social simulacra shift the behaviors that they generate appropriately in response to design changes, and that they enable exploration of "what if?" scenarios where community members or moderators intervene. To power social simulacra, we contribute techniques for prompting a large language model to generate thousands of distinct community members and their social interactions with each other; these techniques are enabled by the observation that large language models' training data already includes a wide variety of positive and negative behavior on social media platforms. In evaluations, we show that participants are often unable to distinguish social simulacra from actual community behavior and that social computing designers successfully refine their social computing designs when using social simulacra.

Key facts. Cited by 300 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 8 Aug 2022.

Builds on

No reference list yet.

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2022: 2; 2023: 58; 2024: 92; 2025: 82; 2026: 66.

300 papers.

Sort:

By area:

  1. 2023Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behaviorcited by 3,500
  2. 2023A Survey on Large Language Model based Autonomous Agentscited by 2,203
  3. 2023Whose Opinions Do Language Models Reflect?cited by 759
  4. 2024Large Language Model based Multi-Agents: A Survey of Progress and Challengescited by 752
  5. 2023AlpacaFarm: A Simulation Framework for Methods that Learn from Human Feedbackcited by 738
  6. 2023Identifying the Risks of LM Agents with an LM-Emulated Sandboxcited by 514
  7. 2022Using Large Language Models to Simulate Multiple Humans and Replicate Human Subject Studiescited by 506
  8. 2023Towards Measuring the Representation of Subjective Global Opinions in Language Modelscited by 424
  9. 2023SOTOPIA: Interactive Evaluation for Social Intelligence in Language Agentscited by 350
  10. 2023Character-LLM: A Trainable Agent for Role-Playingcited by 335
  11. 2023Large Language Models Empowered Agent-based Modeling and Simulation: A Survey and Perspectivescited by 253
  12. 2023Can Large Language Models Transform Computational Social Science?cited by 245
38 more
  1. 2023Evaluating the Moral Beliefs Encoded in LLMscited by 211
  2. 2023AutoAgents: A Framework for Automatic Agent Generationcited by 211
  3. 2024From Persona to Personalization: A Survey on Role-Playing Language Agentscited by 206
  4. 2024Chain of Agents: Large Language Models Collaborating on Long-Context Taskscited by 201
  5. 2023Bias Runs Deep: Implicit Reasoning Biases in Persona-Assigned LLMscited by 191
  6. 2023Do LLMs exhibit human-like response biases? A case study in survey designcited by 176
  7. 2024A Roadmap to Pluralistic Alignmentcited by 175
  8. 2023FinMem: A Performance-Enhanced LLM Trading Agent with Layered Memory and Character Designcited by 163
  9. 2024Understanding World or Predicting Future? A Comprehensive Survey of World Modelscited by 161
  10. 2023LM vs LM: Detecting Factual Errors via Cross Examinationcited by 155
  11. 2023EconAgent: Large Language Model-Empowered Agents for Simulating Macroeconomic Activitiescited by 154
  12. 2023Simulating Opinion Dynamics with Networks of LLM-based Agentscited by 153
  13. 2023Harms from Increasingly Agentic Algorithmic Systemscited by 134
  14. 2024Exploring Large Language Model based Intelligent Agents: Definitions, Methods, and Prospectscited by 130
  15. 2024OASIS: Open Agent Social Interaction Simulations with One Million Agentscited by 127
  16. 2024Cooperate or Collapse: Emergence of Sustainable Cooperation in a Society of LLM Agentscited by 120
  17. 2023ReviewerGPT? An Exploratory Study on Using Large Language Models for Paper Reviewingcited by 118
  18. 2024Empowering Biomedical Discovery with AI Agentscited by 117
  19. 2024Meta-Prompting: Enhancing Language Models with Task-Agnostic Scaffoldingcited by 115
  20. 2024Systematic Biases in LLM Simulations of Debatescited by 98
  21. 2023CoMPosT: Characterizing and Evaluating Caricature in LLM Simulationscited by 94
  22. 2023Navigating the Grey Area: How Expressions of Uncertainty and Overconfidence Affect Language Modelscited by 91
  23. 2023Can Large Language Models Serve as Rational Players in Game Theory? A Systematic Analysiscited by 91
  24. 2023AgentSims: An Open-Source Sandbox for Large Language Model Evaluationcited by 86
  25. 2023MetaAgents: Large Language Model Based Agents for Decision-Making on Teamingcited by 85
  26. 2023Sensitivity, Performance, Robustness: Deconstructing the Effect of Sociodemographic Promptingcited by 80
  27. 2023Training Socially Aligned Language Models on Simulated Social Interactionscited by 77
  28. 2024From Individual to Society: A Survey on Social Simulation Driven by Large Language Model-based Agentscited by 76
  29. 2023EvalLM: Interactive Evaluation of Large Language Model Prompts on User-Defined Criteriacited by 73
  30. 2024Roleplay-doh: Enabling Domain-Experts to Create LLM-simulated Patients via Eliciting and Adhering to Principlescited by 72
  31. 2023Let the LLMs Talk: Simulating Human-to-Human Conversational QA via Zero-Shot LLM-to-LLM Interactionscited by 70
  32. 2024Feedback Loops With Language Models Drive In-Context Reward Hackingcited by 70
  33. 2024Unveiling the Truth and Facilitating Change: Towards Agent-based Large-scale Social Movement Simulationcited by 69
  34. 2024On the Societal Impact of Open Foundation Modelscited by 64
  35. 2024Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? The Misleading Success of Simulating Social Interactions With LLMscited by 59
  36. 2024Determinants of LLM-assisted Decision-Makingcited by 55
  37. 2023Rehearsal: Simulating Conflict to Teach Conflict Resolutioncited by 54
  38. 2024A Survey on LLM-based Multi-Agent System: Recent Advances and New Frontiers in Applicationcited by 54

50 most cited of 300 All 300 (JSON)