arXiv:2607. 18310v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Synthetic-population tools increasingly run every individual as an independent large language model (LLM) agent.
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The study investigates how demographic identity is represented in a language model, using representational similarity analysis against Pew survey data across 169 demographic cells. It finds that standard last‑token read‑outs underestimate the model’s fidelity, while specific attention heads (notably L11 H16) capture demographic structure more accurately, though race‑based types remain weak. Causal interventions reveal that high fidelity does not guarantee causal use, and a 128‑dimensional probe of a single head improves alignment with survey truth but fails to recover per‑question group ordering.
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.
Using large language models (LLMs) to simulate diverse human populations has the potential to transform many aspects of computational social science, yet many evaluations score the average response ra...
arXiv:2608.18768v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models are widely used to simulate survey respondents, yet their outputs are homogeneous and unfaithful to real inter-group differen...
arXiv:2607. 25292v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Silicon sampling uses language models as proxies for human survey respondents, treating each model call as an independent draw from the persona's response distribution.
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...