# An evolutionary model of personality traits related to cooperative behavior using a large language model

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.05976 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05976/

## Key facts

- Cited by 18 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 25 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Oct 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03442/) (2023)
- [GPTQ: Accurate Post-Training Quantization for Generative Pre-trained Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.17323/) (2022)
- [Large Language Models as Optimizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03409/) (2023)
- [Playing repeated games with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16867/) (2023)
- [Personality Traits in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00184/) (2023)
- [Evolution through Large Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08896/) (2022)
- [Language Model Crossover: Variation through Few-Shot Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12170/) (2023)
- [Boosting Theory-of-Mind Performance in Large Language Models via Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11490/) (2023)
- [Metacognitive Prompting Improves Understanding in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05342/) (2023)
- [The Machine Psychology of Cooperation: Can GPT models operationalise prompts for altruism, cooperation, competitiveness and selfishness in economic games?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07970/) (2023)
- [Evolutionary latent space search for driving human portrait generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.11887/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Large Language Models Empowered Agent-based Modeling and Simulation: A Survey and Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11970/) (2023)
- [LLM as a Mastermind: A Survey of Strategic Reasoning with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01230/) (2024)
- [Evolutionary Computation in the Era of Large Language Model: Survey and Roadmap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10034/) (2024)
- [From Individual to Society: A Survey on Social Simulation Driven by Large Language Model-based Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03563/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Large Language Model-Based Social Agents in Game-Theoretic Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03920/) (2024)
- [The Better Angels of Machine Personality: How Personality Relates to LLM Safety](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12344/) (2024)
- [Game Theory Meets Large Language Models: A Systematic Survey with Taxonomy and New Frontiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.09053/) (2025)
- [Evolving AI Collectives to Enhance Human Diversity and Enable Self-Regulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12590/) (2024)
- [Evolution of Social Norms in LLM Agents using Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.00993/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Human-Centric LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.14491/) (2024)
- [AFSPP: Agent Framework for Shaping Preference and Personality with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02870/) (2024)
- [Interpretable Risk Mitigation in LLM Agent Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.10670/) (2025)
- [Personas Evolved: Designing Ethical LLM-Based Conversational Agent Personalities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20513/) (2025)
- [Evolutionary ecology of words](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.05863/) (2025)
- [Agentic Society: Merging skeleton from real world and texture from Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.10550/) (2024)
- [People Are Highly Cooperative with Large Language Models, Especially When Communication Is Possible or Following Human Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.18639/) (2025)
- [Living the Novel: A System for Generating Self-Training Timeline-Aware Conversational Agents from Novels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.07474/) (2025)
- [How memory can affect collective and cooperative behaviors in an LLM-Based Social Particle Swarm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.12250/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper aims to shed light on the evolutionary dynamics of diverse and social populations by introducing the rich expressiveness of generative models into the trait expression of social agent-based evolutionary models. Specifically, we focus on the evolution of personality traits in the context of a game-theoretic relationship as a situation in which inter-individual interests exert strong selection pressures. We construct an agent model in which linguistic descriptions of personality traits related to cooperative behavior are used as genes. The deterministic strategies extracted from Large Language Model (LLM) that make behavioral decisions based on these personality traits are used as behavioral traits. The population is evolved according to selection based on average payoff and mutation of genes by asking LLM to slightly modify the parent gene toward cooperative or selfish. Through preliminary experiments and analyses, we clarify that such a model can indeed exhibit the evolution of cooperative behavior based on the diverse and higher-order representation of personality traits. We also observed the repeated intrusion of cooperative and selfish personality traits through changes in the expression of personality traits, and found that the emerging words in the evolved gene well reflected the behavioral tendency of its personality in terms of their semantics.