The study evaluates mentalization—the capacity to infer others’ beliefs and intentions—in large language models (LLMs) using two economic games and cognitive computational modeling. Researchers tested 2,099 LLM agents from four model families (DeepSeek, GPT‑4.1, GPT‑5, Gemini 2.0 Flash) against opponents of varying sophistication, comparing their performance to 251 human participants. Results show that LLMs exhibit distinct mentalizing behaviors that vary by model provider and size, with strategic prompting generally enhancing performance; notably, GPT‑5 agents adapt their recursive reasoning depth to match opponent sophistication, outperforming humans in one task.
By Aamir Sohail, Xintong Zhong, Arkady Konovalov, Patricia L. Lockwood, Lei Zhang
arXiv:2510. 10813v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to domains that require reasoning about other agents' behavior, such as negotiation, policy design, and market simulation.
By Enric Junque de Fortuny, Veronica Roberta Cappelli
arXiv:2608. 11624v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Persuasion is a core dynamic of natural language communication, shaping how large language models (LLMs) update beliefs, resolve disagreements, and reach decisions.
By Nimet Beyza Bozdag, Emre Can Acikgoz, Gokhan Tur, Dilek Hakkani-T\"ur
Persuasion is a core dynamic of natural language communication, shaping how large language models (LLMs) update beliefs, resolve disagreements, and reach decisions. As LLMs increasingly debate, advise, and think collaboratively with humans and each other, resistance to harmful persuasion becomes a core requirement for reliable behavior.
arXiv:2607. 11632v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Human choice behavior, including route choice, exhibits systematic behavioral biases that deviate from the assumptions of full rationality.
By Jiangtao Han, Shoufeng Ma, Shuxian Xu, Geng Li, Shuai Ling, Ning Jia, Zhengbing He
Human choice behavior, including route choice, exhibits systematic behavioral biases that deviate from the assumptions of full rationality. Cumulative prospect theory (CPT) has been widely recognized as an effective framework for characterizing such behavioral patterns.
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 paper presents an AI-based method that uses a large language model to emulate human decision-making by assigning it a "type vector" describing traits such as Altruism and Risk Aversion. By varying these dimensions and values, the authors fit the model to over 119,000 decisions from 78,657 participants in 10 classic economic games, finding that three dimensions—Risk Aversion, Strategic Sophistication, and Trust—sufficiently capture human behavior. The resulting type clusters, fewer than a dozen, predict behavior in new games, suggesting a low-dimensional, portable representation of human behavior across diverse settings.
By Matthew O. Jackson, Benjamin S. Manning, Yutong Xie, Walter Yuan, Qiaozhu Mei
arXiv:2608.18265v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: We introduce a general, easy-to-implement AI-based method for modeling and analyzing the structure and complexity of human behavior. We assig...
By Matthew O. Jackson, Benjamin S. Manning, Yutong Xie, Walter Yuan, Qiaozhu Mei
The paper presents an AI-based method that models human behavior by assigning a language model a vector of trait intensities—called a type vector—and asking it to predict actions in various settings. By adjusting traits such as Altruism, Risk Aversion, Fairness, and Trust, the authors fit the model to 119,147 decisions from 78,657 subjects across 35 countries and 10 economic games, finding that three dimensions (Risk Aversion, Strategic Sophistication, and Trust) closely match human choices. The resulting type vectors cluster into fewer than a dozen groups and can predict behavior in new games with different rules, demonstrating the method’s generalizability and interpretability.
By Matthew O. Jackson, Benjamin S. Manning, Yutong Xie, Walter Yuan, Qiaozhu Mei
The study examines how the effort expended by large reasoning models (LRMs) compares to that of humans during abductive reasoning tasks. By analyzing reaction times and reasoning traces, the authors find that LRMs and humans exhibit similar patterns of effort and error types. They also demonstrate that decoding strategies allowing models to explore multiple reasoning paths further align the models’ reasoning costs with human effort.
By Henry Arthur
arXiv:2609.16436v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Simulations based on large language models (LLMs) have proven to be powerful for understanding human behavior, making them valuable additions to the...
By Jiayue Gaveal Fan, Arul Murugan, Shreyas Krishnan, Abhishek Nagaraj