Echo Chambers or Stubborn Minds? Simulating Social Influence with LLM Agents
Large language models aren’t just prompt-completion machines anymore. In controlled simulations, they can behave like people in a group discussion: yielding to peer pressure, sticking to their beliefs, or becoming more extreme over time. But not all LLMs are socially equal. A recent paper titled “Towards Simulating Social Influence Dynamics with LLM-based Multi-agents” explores how different LLMs behave in a forum-style discussion, capturing three phenomena familiar to any political science researcher or Reddit moderator: conformity, group polarization, and fragmentation. The twist? These aren’t real people. They’re fully scripted LLM agents with fixed personas, engaged in asynchronous multi-round debates. ...