mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Identity, Cooperation and Framing Effects within Groups of Real and Simulated Humans

arXiv 2601.16355 ↗First posted 22 Jan 2026cs.CLcited by 4

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Abstract (arXiv)

Humans act via a nuanced process that depends both on rational deliberation and also on identity and contextual factors. In this work, we study how large language models (LLMs) can simulate human action in the context of social dilemma games. While prior work has focused on "steering" (weak binding) of chat models to simulate personas, we analyze here how deep binding of base models with extended backstories leads to more faithful replication of identity-based behaviors. Our study has these findings: simulation fidelity vs human studies is improved by conditioning base LMs with rich context of narrative identities and checking consistency using instruction-tuned models. We show that LLMs can also model contextual factors such as time (year that a study was performed), question framing, and participant pool effects. LLMs, therefore, allow us to explore the details that affect human studies but which are often omitted from experiment descriptions, and which hamper accurate replication.

Key facts. Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 30 of its 57 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 22 Jan 2026.

Builds on

30 of 57 references.

References · 30

  1. 2023LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Modelscited by 13,958
  2. 2023Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behaviorcited by 3,500
  3. 2022Discovering Language Model Behaviors with Model-Written Evaluationscited by 805
  4. 2023Whose Opinions Do Language Models Reflect?cited by 759
  5. 2022Out of One, Many: Using Language Models to Simulate Human Samplescited by 737
  6. 2022Using Large Language Models to Simulate Multiple Humans and Replicate Human Subject Studiescited by 506
  7. 2022Using cognitive psychology to understand GPT-3cited by 389
  8. 2022Social Simulacra: Creating Populated Prototypes for Social Computing Systemscited by 300
  9. 2024LLM Agents Grounded in Self-Reports Enable General-Purpose Simulation of Individualscited by 235
  10. 2023PersonaLLM: Investigating the Ability of Large Language Models to Express Personality Traitscited by 229
  11. 2023Marked Personas: Using Natural Language Prompts to Measure Stereotypes in Language Modelscited by 204
  12. 2023The political ideology of conversational AI: Converging evidence on ChatGPT's pro-environmental, left-libertarian orientationcited by 183
18 more
  1. 2024Large language models that replace human participants can harmfully misportray and flatten identity groupscited by 137
  2. 2023Generative agent-based modeling with actions grounded in physical, social, or digital space using Concordiacited by 119
  3. 2023Avalon's Game of Thoughts: Battle Against Deception through Recursive Contemplationcited by 102
  4. 2023CoMPosT: Characterizing and Evaluating Caricature in LLM Simulationscited by 94
  5. 2023Can Large Language Models Serve as Rational Players in Game Theory? A Systematic Analysiscited by 91
  6. 2025LLM Generated Persona is a Promise with a Catchcited by 77
  7. 2022Moral Mimicry: Large Language Models Produce Moral Rationalizations Tailored to Political Identitycited by 71
  8. 2025Language Model Fine-Tuning on Scaled Survey Data for Predicting Distributions of Public Opinionscited by 64
  9. 2023LLM-Based Agent Society Investigation: Collaboration and Confrontation in Avalon Gameplaycited by 62
  10. 2024Virtual Personas for Language Models via an Anthology of Backstoriescited by 49
  11. 2022Estimating the Personality of White-Box Language Modelscited by 47
  12. 2023AI-Augmented Surveys: Leveraging Large Language Models and Surveys for Opinion Predictioncited by 46
  13. 2022CommunityLM: Probing Partisan Worldviews from Language Modelscited by 36
  14. 2023Language Models Trained on Media Diets Can Predict Public Opinioncited by 30
  15. 2023Cooperation on the Fly: Exploring Language Agents for Ad Hoc Teamwork in the Avalon Gamecited by 27
  16. 2024AnthroScore: A Computational Linguistic Measure of Anthropomorphismcited by 27
  17. 2024Rediscovering the Latent Dimensions of Personality with Large Language Models as Trait Descriptorscited by 6
  18. 2025To Mask or to Mirror: Human-AI Alignment in Collective Reasoningcited by 5

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 4.

4 papers.

  1. 2026Quantifying the Utility of User Simulators for Building Collaborative LLM Assistantscited by 6
  2. 2026The Illusion of Intervention: Your LLM-Simulated Experiment is an Observational Studycited by 4
  3. 2026Toward a social psychology of AI: language-model agents reproduce human-like minimal-group biascited by 2
  4. 2026Pretrained Persona Mixture Models and Tandem Models for Human Simulationcited by 0