mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Can A Society of Generative Agents Simulate Human Behavior and Inform Public Health Policy? A Case Study on Vaccine Hesitancy

arXiv 2503.09639 ↗First posted 12 Mar 2025cs.MA cs.AI cs.CLcited by 17

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Social simulation and multi-agent debate

Abstract (arXiv)

Can we simulate a sandbox society with generative agents to model human behavior, thereby reducing the over-reliance on real human trials for assessing public policies? In this work, we investigate the feasibility of simulating health-related decision-making, using vaccine hesitancy, defined as the delay in acceptance or refusal of vaccines despite the availability of vaccination services (MacDonald, 2015), as a case study. To this end, we introduce the VacSim framework with 100 generative agents powered by Large Language Models (LLMs). VacSim simulates vaccine policy outcomes with the following steps: 1) instantiate a population of agents with demographics based on census data; 2) connect the agents via a social network and model vaccine attitudes as a function of social dynamics and disease-related information; 3) design and evaluate various public health interventions aimed at mitigating vaccine hesitancy. To align with real-world results, we also introduce simulation warmup and attitude modulation to adjust agents' attitudes. We propose a series of evaluations to assess the reliability of various LLM simulations. Experiments indicate that models like Llama and Qwen can simulate aspects of human behavior but also highlight real-world alignment challenges, such as inconsistent responses with demographic profiles. This early exploration of LLM-driven simulations is not meant to serve as definitive policy guidance; instead, it serves as a call for action to examine social simulation for policy development.

Key facts. Cited by 17 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Social simulation and multi-agent debate, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 26 of its 74 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 12 Mar 2025.

Builds on

26 of 74 references.

Closest ancestors · 10

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025AgentSociety: Large-Scale Simulation of LLM-Driven Generative Agents Advances Understanding of Human Behaviors and Society12 Feb
  2. 2024LLM Agents Grounded in Self-Reports Enable General-Purpose Simulation of Individuals15 Nov
  3. 2024GenSim: A General Social Simulation Platform with Large Language Model based Agents6 Oct
  4. 2024Towards Implicit Bias Detection and Mitigation in Multi-Agent LLM Interactions3 Oct
  5. 2024On the limits of agency in agent-based models14 Sep
  6. 2024AgentCourt: Simulating Court with Adversarial Evolvable Lawyer Agents15 Aug
  7. 2024Emergence of Social Norms in Generative Agent Societies: Principles and Architecture13 Mar
  8. 2023EconAgent: Large Language Model-Empowered Agents for Simulating Macroeconomic Activities16 Oct
  9. 2023Epidemic Modeling with Generative Agents11 Jul
  10. 2023Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior7 Apr

Other references · 16

  1. 2024The Llama 3 Herd of Modelscited by 14,715
  2. 2019Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networkscited by 9,170
  3. 2024Qwen2.5 Technical Reportcited by 4,942
  4. 2024Phi-3 Technical Report: A Highly Capable Language Model Locally on Your Phonecited by 1,917
  5. 2021Calibrate Before Use: Improving Few-Shot Performance of Language Modelscited by 1,392
  6. 2020ColBERT: Efficient and Effective Passage Search via Contextualized Late Interaction over BERTcited by 1,178
  7. 2024Refusal in Language Models Is Mediated by a Single Directioncited by 1,032
  8. 2024Agent Hospital: A Simulacrum of Hospital with Evolvable Medical Agentscited by 218
  9. 2023Language Agents with Reinforcement Learning for Strategic Play in the Werewolf Gamecited by 152
  10. 2024Simulating Classroom Education with LLM-Empowered Agentscited by 127
  11. 2023Simulating Social Media Using Large Language Models to Evaluate Alternative News Feed Algorithmscited by 65
  12. 2024Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? The Misleading Success of Simulating Social Interactions With LLMscited by 59
4 more
  1. 2024LLMs generate structurally realistic social networks but overestimate political homophilycited by 33
  2. 2024A Simulation System Towards Solving Societal-Scale Manipulationcited by 12
  3. 2023Accurate Measures of Vaccination and Concerns of Vaccine Holdouts from Web Search Logscited by 3
  4. 2022Deep Learning Reveals Patterns of Diverse and Changing Sentiments Towards COVID-19 Vaccines Based on 11 Million Tweetscited by 1

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2025: 9; 2026: 8.

17 papers.

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  1. 2025Social World Modelscited by 16
  2. 2025The PIMMUR Principles: Ensuring Validity in Collective Behavior of LLM Societiescited by 14
  3. 2025Beyond Static Responses: Multi-Agent LLM Systems as a New Paradigm for Social Science Researchcited by 10
  4. 2026Stop Drawing Scientific Claims from LLM Social Simulations Without Robustness Auditscited by 8
  5. 2025Do Role-Playing Agents Practice What They Preach? Belief-Behavior Consistency in LLM-Based Simulations of Human Trustcited by 6
  6. 2025Who Gets the Kidney? Human-AI Alignment, Indecision, and Moral Valuescited by 2
  7. 2025Improving the Distributional Alignment of LLMs using Supervisioncited by 2
  8. 2025What Makes LLM Agent Simulations Useful for Policy Practice? An Iterative Design Study in Emergency Preparednesscited by 2
  9. 2025SimCity: Multi-Agent Urban Development Simulation with Rich Interactionscited by 2
  10. 2026Sentipolis: Emotion-Aware Agents for Social Simulationscited by 2
  11. 2025AI-VaxGuide: An Agentic RAG-Based LLM for Vaccination Decisionscited by 1
  12. 2026Step-Level Preference Learning for Generative Agents in Social Simulationscited by 1
5 more
  1. 2026Informing AI Policy Assessment using Large-Scale Simulation of Interventionscited by 0
  2. 2026SidConArena: An Environment Evaluating Agents in Open-Ended,Positive-Sum Bargaining Gamecited by 0
  3. 2026Demographic Pluralism: Inference-Time Modeling of Pluralistic Human Preference Distributionscited by 0
  4. 2026EpiWorld: Grounding LLM Policy Agents in Epidemiological World Modelscited by 0
  5. 2026PsyBer-Agent: A Psychology-Driven User Agent for Recommender Systemscited by 0

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026A Large Language Model-Driven Agent-Based Modeling Framework with Multi-Round Communication for Simulating Vaccine Opinion Dynamics
  2. 2025Evaluating the Bias in LLMs for Surveying Opinion and Decision Making in Healthcare
  3. 2026The Epi-LLM Framework: probing LLM behavioral priors through epidemiological agent-based models
  4. 2025Infected Smallville: How Disease Threat Shapes Sociality in LLM Agents
  5. 2025Simulating Persuasive Dialogues on Meat Reduction with Generative Agents
  6. 2023Generative Agent-Based Modeling: Unveiling Social System Dynamics through Coupling Mechanistic Models with Generative Artificial Intelligence
  7. 2026Prompt Sensitivity of Generative Agents: Evidence from an Epidemic Model
  8. 2024From Individual to Society: A Survey on Social Simulation Driven by Large Language Model-based Agents