arXiv:2411. 10109v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Machine learning can predict human behavior well when substantial structured data are available for well-defined outcomes.
arXiv:2608. 14606v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as synthetic survey respondents, but existing evaluations ask whether answers look plausible at the individual level.
arXiv:2609.22090v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: An LLM producing the response pattern associated with a human psychological effect is not the same claim as the LLM possessing that bias. We present Ps...
arXiv:2608.29455v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLMs are increasingly used as human surrogates, often on the premise that richer persona data could make them substitutes or exploratory tools for sp...
The study evaluates whether large language models (LLMs) used as synthetic personas can predict real audience responses to marketing copy. Using thousands of headline A/B tests from the Upworthy Research Archive, the authors compare a ten-persona panel grounded in real audience demographics to a no-persona zero‑shot baseline that asks the model for a typical reader’s click likelihood. Results show that the no‑persona baseline outperforms the persona‑based approach, with higher predictive validity and top‑1 accuracy, indicating that forcing the model to role‑play specific personas introduces bias and noise.
The paper investigates whether human psychometric questionnaires can reliably characterize large language models (LLMs) in everyday interactions. By comparing eight open‑source LLMs’ value and personality profiles from Likert self‑reports (PVQ‑40/21 and BFI‑44/10) with generation probabilities on value‑laden user queries, the authors find substantial divergence between the two methods. The study shows that questionnaire items contain explicit lexical cues that lead models to respond in socially desirable ways, whereas realistic user queries lack such cues, and demographic persona prompts shift questionnaire responses but not generation outputs, indicating that questionnaire scores overestimate LLMs’ true behavioral tendencies.
arXiv:2606. 20205v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Psychological instruments designed for humans are increasingly used to assign large language models (LLMs) stable psychological profiles that affect their usability, safety assessment, and use as proxies for human participants in research.
arXiv:2607. 26348v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as synthetic users, stand-ins for human respondents whose simulated answers feed product, policy, and market decisions.
arXiv:2605.29791v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While Large Language Models (LLMs) can convincingly simulate personas in explicit self-reports, they often deviate in implicit behavioral decisions...
arXiv:2510. 22170v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Persona conditioning is widely used to steer large language model (LLM) behavior, but it is unclear whether it induces stable behavioral structure or superficial variation.
The paper examines how large language models (LLMs) respond to different demographic cues—such as names—when users seek advice, focusing on race and gender in a U.S. context. It finds that using different cues for the same group leads to only partially overlapping changes in model responses, producing inconsistent conclusions about personalization and unstable bias metrics. The authors argue that LLMs react to linguistic signals tied to cues rather than to stable demographic categories, and they call for evaluations that use multiple cues and consider underlying mechanisms.
The paper introduces a three-tier persona vector for user simulation in evaluating LLM agents, comprising 23 dimensions across demographics, behavioral traits, and emotional states, plus a query-complexity overlay. It demonstrates that these nuanced personas generate diverse, scenario-reactive conversations, leading to significant variations in agent goal achievement and compliance across different contexts. The model’s design allows for reproducible, auditable user behavior patterns without relying on learned covariance matrices.