arXiv AI
Sep 28

Thinking Less to Simulate Better: Intuitive Prompting Improves LLM Agents Simulating Individual Social Media Reactions, Including Unfamiliar Content

The study evaluates how well language‑model agents can simulate individual social media reactions by comparing predictions under different prompt conditions. Eight Serbian participants’ reactions to 68 posts were recorded, and four language models were asked to predict these reactions using prompts that varied in profile content and instruction style. The results show that prompts emphasizing attitudinal content and intuitive, immediate responses yield the highest fidelity, outperforming demographic backstories and a crowd baseline, and suggesting that such agents could act as general‑purpose simulated users.

By Ljubisa Bojic, Tijana Stanic, Joerg Matthes, Agariadne Dwinggo Samala, Bojana Dinic, Jue Wang