The study audits 576 LLM-based social simulations from 350 papers using the PIMMUR framework, which evaluates agent profile, interaction, memory, minimal control, unawareness, and realism. Results show that PIMMUR principles are met more often than minimal control, unawareness, and realism, with frontier LLMs correctly identifying the underlying experiment in 65.2% of cases and half of prompts pre‑determining outcomes. Reproducing five experiments revealed that many reported collective phenomena disappear or reverse when PIMMUR principles are enforced, suggesting that apparent emergent behaviors may be methodological artifacts rather than genuine social dynamics.
By Jiaxu Zhou, Jen-tse Huang, Xuhui Zhou, Man Ho Lam, Xintao Wang, Hao Zhu, Wenxuan Wang, Maarten Sap
arXiv:2411. 10109v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Machine learning can predict human behavior well when substantial structured data are available for well-defined outcomes.
By Joon Sung Park, Carolyn Q. Zou, Jonne Kamphorst, Niles Egan, Aaron Shaw, Benjamin Mako Hill, Carrie Cai, Meredith Ringel Morris, Percy Liang, Robb Willer, Michael S. Bernstein
arXiv:2511. 04500v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as decision-making agents in high-stakes domains and as imitators of human behavior in the social and behavioral sciences.
By Andrea Cera Palatsi, Samuel Martin-Gutierrez, Ana S. Cardenal, Max Pellert
The study introduces a World Values Survey–grounded simulation framework to test whether large language model agents can faithfully represent diverse human value systems. In about 4,000 conversations with 1,200 personas across three models, more than half of the agents failed to express their assigned value profiles from the start, and only 2–7% drifted over time. The results show systematic deviations from the intended value distributions and reveal that simulated dialogues differ from human discussions in their balance of stylistic consistency and semantic diversity.
By Farah Atif, Sougata Saha, Monojit Choudhury
arXiv:2607. 26588v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The rapid development of large language models (LLMs) has renewed interest in agent-based modeling (ABM).
By Shaopeng Wei, Yufei Cheng, Wenxi Sun, Yepeng Ding, Yu Zhao, Gang Kou
arXiv:2507. 19593v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Classical game-theoretic models typically assume rational agents, complete information, and common knowledge of payoffs - assumptions that are often violated in real-world MAS characterized by uncertainty, misaligned perceptions, and nested beliefs.
By Vince Trencsenyi, Agnieszka Mensfelt, Kostas Stathis
arXiv:2507. 09788v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLM) have led to a new class of autonomous agents, renewing and expanding interest in the area.
By Paulo Salem, Robert Sim, Christopher Olsen, Prerit Saxena, Rafael Barcelos, Yi Ding
arXiv:2604. 22748v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As AI systems move from generating text to accomplishing goals through sustained interaction, the ability to model environment dynamics becomes a central bottleneck.
By Meng Chu, Xuan Billy Zhang, Kevin Qinghong Lin, Lingdong Kong, Jize Zhang, Teng Tu, Weijian Ma, Ziqi Huang, Senqiao Yang, Wei Huang, Yeying Jin, Zhefan Rao, Jinhui Ye, Xinyu Lin, Xichen Zhang, Qisheng Hu, Shuai Yang, Leyang Shen, Wei Chow, Yifei Dong, Fengyi Wu, Quanyu Long, Bin Xia, Shaozuo Yu, Mingkang Zhu, Wenhu Zhang, Jiehui Huang, Haokun Gui, Runyi Li, Shiyi Du, Xu Huang, Dong Huang, Rui Liu, Chenyu Tang, Xuhang Chen, Chengzu Li, Haoxuan Che, Long Chen, Qifeng Chen, Wenxuan Zhang, Wenya Wang, Xiaojuan Qi, Yang Deng, Yanwei Li, Mike Zheng Shou, Zhi-Qi Cheng, See-Kiong Ng, Ziwei Liu, Philip Torr, Jiaya Jia
arXiv:2602.00685v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as simulated participants in social science experiments, but their behavior is often unstable an...
By Xuan Liu, Haoyang Shang, Zizhang Liu, Xinyan Liu, Yunze Xiao, Yiwen Tu, Haojian Jin
arXiv:2608. 11215v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Simulating societies of many large language model (LLM) agents is expensive, yet the questions asked of such simulations are usually macroscopic: phase behaviour, stylised facts, and scaling with the number of agents $N$, not the cognition of any single agent.
By Igor Itkin
arXiv:2607. 06080v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Putnam's Social Capital Theory is a foundational framework for collective action and community prosperity.
By Shiyi Ling, Zhi Zheng, Hui Zheng, Wenjun Xue, Feng Ye, Tong Xu
The article presents a minimal working model for large language model (LLM) systems, emphasizing four key distinctions—pretraining vs. deployment, distribution vs. samples, types of memory, and task competence vs. agency. Using this framework, it diagnoses six common misconceptions about LLMs (next‑token prediction, regression to the mean, training‑data regurgitation, model memory, alignment, and understanding), explaining what each misconception captures correctly, where it conflates distinctions, and the implications for evaluation, design, and governance. The model is applied to AI policy language, illustrating how policy can misrepresent these distinctions and offering a diagnostic toolkit to correct such errors.
By Zhicheng Lin