# Using Large Language Models to Simulate Human Behavioural Experiments: Port of Mars

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.05555 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05555/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 5 Jun 2025.

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Persona Generators: Generating Diverse Synthetic Personas for Arbitrary Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.03545/) (2026)
- [Evaluating Cooperation in LLM Social Groups through Elected Leadership](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.11721/) (2026)
- [Too Open for Opinion? Embracing Open-Endedness in Large Language Models for Social Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.13884/) (2025)
- [Can LLMs Think Like Consumers? Benchmarking Crowd-Level Reaction Reconstruction with ConsumerSimBench](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.17079/) (2026)
- [Item-Mean Surrogates: Why Richer Persona Data Fail to Improve LLMs as Human Surrogates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.29455/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Collective risk social dilemmas (CRSD) highlight a trade-off between individual preferences and the need for all to contribute toward achieving a group objective. Problems such as climate change are in this category, and so it is critical to understand their social underpinnings. However, rigorous CRSD methodology often demands large-scale human experiments but it is difficult to guarantee sufficient power and heterogeneity over socio-demographic factors. Generative AI offers a potential complementary approach to address thisproblem. By replacing human participants with large language models (LLM), it allows for a scalable empirical framework. This paper focuses on the validity of this approach and whether it is feasible to represent a large-scale human-like experiment with sufficient diversity using LLM. In particular, where previous literature has focused on political surveys, virtual towns and classical game-theoretic examples, we focus on a complex CRSD used in the institutional economics and sustainability literature known as Port of Mars