arXiv Computation and Language August 27, 2026 By Haodong Zhao, Jidong Li, Zhaomin Wu, Tianjie Ju, Zhuosheng Zhang, Bingsheng He, Gongshen Liu

Reasoning or Rambling? Exploring the Effect of Thinking on Agent Persuasion

Read the original on arXiv Computation and Language →

The paper investigates how explicit reasoning in Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) affects their ability to persuade and be persuaded. Experiments on objective and subjective tasks reveal a Persuasion Duality: reasoning boosts an agent’s persuasive power by about 21 percentage points while also making it less susceptible to incorrect persuasion by up to 10 percentage points. However, the study finds that persuasiveness often relies on superficial cues like response length and repetition rather than logical validity, and that persuasion can amplify or attenuate non‑linearly across multi‑hop agent chains. The authors also propose an attention‑guided prompt‑level adversarial argument detection method that improves agent robustness.

Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at arXiv Computation and Language.

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