Large Language Model-Based Social Simulation

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Overview

This field uses language-model agents to model people interacting through networks, institutions, and shared environments, studying outcomes such as opinion change, cooperation, norms, mobility, and policy responses. Common approaches ground agents in surveys, interviews, behavioral histories, or psychological profiles, then combine prompting or fine-tuning with agent-based models, games, memory, and network dynamics. Researchers validate simulations against human surveys, experiments, and real-world traces, measuring both individual response distributions and collective patterns over time. A central challenge is that plausible dialogue or accurate averages do not ensure faithful individual behavior, diverse populations, causal conclusions, or robust results across models and settings.

Latest papers

CardsList

261 papers53 papers in the last four weeks, up 66% on the four weeks before. 0.3% of all new papers.

  1. MALLES: A Multi-agent LLMs-based Economic Sandbox with Consumer Preference Alignment

    Mar 18, 2026Yusen Wu, Yiran Liu, Xiaotie DengMulti-Agent LLM SystemsHuman Behavior Simulation

  2. Evaluating LLM-Simulated Conversations in Modeling Inconsistent and Uncollaborative Behaviors in Human Social Interaction

    Mar 17, 2026Ryo Kamoi, Ameya Godbole, Binglin Zhou +5LLM EvaluationHuman Behavior Simulation

    Penn State University · University of Southern California · Microsoft Corporation

  3. Parametric Social Identity Injection and Diversification in Public Opinion Simulation

    Mar 17, 2026Hexi Wang, Yujia Zhou, Bangde Du +2Large Language Model-Based Social SimulationRepresentation Geometry in Language Models

    DCST, Tsinghua University Beijing, China · Quancheng Laboratory Jinan, Shandong, China

  4. Beyond Self-Interest: Modeling Social-Oriented Motivation for Human-like Multi-Agent Interactions

    Mar 14, 2026Jingzhe Lin, Ceyao Zhang, Yaodong Yang +3Large Language Model-Based Social SimulationMulti-Agent LLM Systems

    School of Artificial Intelligence, Beijing Normal University & Beijing Key Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence for Education & Engineering Research Center of Intelligent Technology and Educational Application, MOE, Beijing, China · School of Intelligence Science and Technology, Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Peking University, Beijing, China · Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Peking University, Beijing, China +2

  5. Emergent decentralized regulation in a purely synthetic society

    Mar 13, 2026Md Motaleb Hossen Manik, Ge WangEmergent Behavior in Multi-Agent SystemsAI Agent Governance

    Department of Computer Science, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York 12180, USA · Department of Biomedical Engineering, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York 12180, USA

  6. Normative Common Ground Replication (NormCoRe): Replication-by-Translation for Studying Norms in Multi-Agent AI

    Mar 12, 2026Luca Deck, Simeon Allmendinger, Lucas Müller +1Large Language Model-Based Social SimulationEmergent Behavior in Multi-Agent Systems

    University of Bayreuth & Fraunhofer FIT, Germany · University of Bayreuth, Germany

  7. LLM-Augmented Digital Twin for Policy Evaluation in Short-Video Platforms

    Mar 11, 2026Haoting Zhang, Yunduan Lin, Jinghai He +3Policy EvaluationDigital Twins

    University of California, Berkeley · The Chinese University of Hong Kong · New York University +1

  8. Interview-Informed Generative Agents for Product Discovery: A Validation Study

    Mar 10, 2026Zichao Wang, Alexa SiuUser SimulationLarge Language Model-Based Social Simulation

    Adobe Research San Jose, CA, USA

  9. Influencing LLM Multi-Agent Dialogue via Policy-Parameterized Prompts

    Mar 10, 2026Hongbo Bo, Jingyu Hu, Weiru LiuMulti-Agent LLM SystemsLLM Agents

    University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom

  10. Evaluating LLMs as Human Surrogates in Controlled Experiments

    Mar 8, 2026Adnan Hoq, Tim WeningerHuman Behavior SimulationLarge Language Model-Based Social Simulation

    University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana, USA

  11. The Yerkes-Dodson Curve for AI Agents: Emergent Cooperation Under Environmental Pressure in Multi-Agent LLM Simulations

    Mar 7, 2026Ivan PasichnykEmergent Behavior in Multi-Agent SystemsMulti-Agent LLM Systems

    WeLabelData Inc.

  12. The Third Ambition: Artificial Intelligence and the Science of Human Behavior

    Mar 7, 2026W. Russell Neuman, Chad ColemanComputational Social ScienceCultural Knowledge in Language Models

    New York University

  13. LieCraft: A Multi-Agent Framework for Evaluating Deceptive Capabilities in Language Models

    Mar 6, 2026Matthew Lyle Olson, Neale Ratzlaff, Musashi Hinck +5Deception in Language ModelsLanguage Model Safety Evaluation

    Oracle · Intel Labs · Oregon State University +2

  14. TerraLingua: Emergence and Analysis of Open-endedness in LLM Ecologies

    Mar 6, 2026Giuseppe Paolo, Jamieson Warner, Hormoz Shahrzad +3Open-Ended EvolutionEmergent Behavior in Multi-Agent Systems

    Cognizant AI Lab · The University of Texas at Austin

  15. Characterizing the ability of LLMs to recapitulate Americans' distributional responses to public opinion polling questions across political issues

    Mar 6, 2026Eric Gong, Nathan E. Sanders, Bruce SchneierLarge Language Model-Based Social SimulationLLM Evaluation

    Harvard College · Berkman-Klein Center, Harvard University · Harvard Kennedy School

  16. HACHIMI: Scalable and Controllable Student Persona Generation via Orchestrated Agents

    Mar 5, 2026Yilin Jiang, Fei Tan, Xuanyu Yin +2Synthetic Data Generation for Language ModelsGenerative AI in Education

    East China Normal University, Shanghai, China · The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), Guangzhou, China · Shanghai Innovation Institute, Shanghai, China

  17. Belief-Sim: Towards Belief-Driven Simulation of Demographic Misinformation Susceptibility

    Mar 3, 2026Angana Borah, Zohaib Khan, Rada Mihalcea +1Human Behavior SimulationLarge Language Model-Based Social Simulation

    University of Michigan - Ann Arbor, USA · Texas State University

  18. How to Model AI Agents as Personas?: Applying the Persona Ecosystem Playground to 41,300 Posts on Moltbook for Behavioral Insights

    Mar 3, 2026Danial Amin, Joni Salminen, Bernard J. JansenLarge Language Model-Based Social SimulationPersonality Modeling in Language Models

    University of Vaasa, , Finland · Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU, , Qatar

  19. Eval4Sim: An Evaluation Framework for Persona Simulation

    Mar 3, 2026Eliseo Bao, Anxo Perez, Javier Parapar +1Large Language Model-Based Role-Play SimulationLarge Language Model-Based Social Simulation

    IRLab, CITIC, Universidade da Coruña A Coruña, Spain · University of Sheffield Sheffield, United Kingdom

  20. A Natural Language Agentic Approach to Study Affective Polarization

    Mar 3, 2026Stephanie Anneris Malvicini, Ewelina Gajewska, Arda Derbent +3Computational Social ScienceLarge Language Model-Based Social Simulation

    Instituto de Investigación en Inteligencia Artificial (IIIA-CSIC) · Departamento de Ciencias e Ingeniería de la Computación, Universidad Nacional del Sur (UNS) · Warsaw University of Technology (WUT)

  21. LLMs as Strategic Actors: Behavioral Alignment, Risk Calibration, and Argumentation Framing in Geopolitical Simulations

    Mar 2, 2026Veronika Solopova, Viktoria Skorik, Maksym Tereshchenko +2Strategic Reasoning Risks in Language ModelsLarge Language Model-Based Social Simulation

  22. LiveCultureBench: a Multi-Agent, Multi-Cultural Benchmark for Large Language Models in Dynamic Social Simulations

    Mar 2, 2026Viet-Thanh Pham, Lizhen Qu, Thuy-Trang Vu +2AI Agent BenchmarksCross-Cultural Language Model Evaluation

    Department of Data Science & AI, Monash University

  23. SimAB: Simulating A/B Tests with Persona-Conditioned AI Agents for Rapid Design Evaluation

    Mar 1, 2026Tim Rieder, Marian Schneider, Mario Truss +6A/b TestingUser Simulation

    ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland · Adobe, Munich, Germany · Adobe, Basel, Switzerland +1

  24. Towards Simulating Social Media Users with LLMs: Evaluating the Operational Validity of Conditioned Comment Prediction

    Feb 26, 2026Nils Schwager, Simon Münker, Alistair Plum +1Large Language Model-Based Social SimulationLanguage Model Generation Evaluation

    Trier University, Trier, Germany · University of Luxembourg, Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg

  25. Sydney Telling Fables on AI and Humans: A Corpus Tracing Memetic Transfer of Persona between LLMs

    Feb 25, 2026Jiří Milička, Hana BednářováPersonality Modeling in Language ModelsPersona-Conditioned Generation

    Charles University, Prague

  26. Dynamic Personality Adaptation in Large Language Models via State Machines

    Feb 25, 2026Leon Pielage, Ole Hätscher, Mitja Back +2Medical EducationPersonality Modeling in Language Models

    Institute for Geoinformatics, University of Münster, 48149 Münster, Germany · Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Münster, 48149 Münster, Germany · Department of Psychology, University of Münster, 48149 Münster, Germany +1

  27. Next Reply Prediction X Dataset: Linguistic Discrepancies in Naively Generated Content

    Feb 22, 2026Simon Münker, Nils Schwager, Kai Kugler +2Language Model Generation EvaluationText Generation

    Trier University, Computational Linguistics · University of Oxford, Sociology

  28. Neural Synchrony Between Socially Interacting Language Models

    Feb 19, 2026Zhining Zhang, Wentao Zhu, Chi Han +2Large Language Model-Based Social SimulationMulti-Agent LLMs

    Peking University · Eastern Institute of Technology, Ningbo · University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  29. AI Agents Alone Are Not (Yet) Sufficient for Social Simulation

    Feb 19, 2026Yiming Li, Dacheng TaoLarge Language Model-Based Social SimulationHuman Behavior Simulation

    College of Computing and Data Science, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

  30. Evaluating Collective Behaviour of Hundreds of LLM Agents

    Feb 18, 2026Richard Willis, Jianing Zhao, Yali Du +1Social DilemmasMulti-Agent LLM Systems

    King’s College London London, United Kingdom · King’s College London · Turing Institute +1