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LLM Agents Grounded in Self-Reports Enable General-Purpose Simulation of Individuals

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abstract

Machine learning can predict human behavior well when substantial structured data are available for well-defined outcomes. Such models are typically outcome-specific, however, requiring training data for each target outcome, limiting their applicability to new domains. We test whether large language models (LLMs) can relax these requirements by using self-report data to build attitudinal and behavioral simulations, or "generative agents," that can predict responses across outcomes without outcome-specific training data. Using data from a diverse national sample of 1,052 Americans, we built agents from (i) two-hour, semi-structured interviews elicited using the American Voices Project interview schedule, (ii) structured surveys including General Social Survey items and the Big Five personality inventory, or (iii) both sources combined. On held-out General Social Survey items, interview-only, survey-only, and combined agents achieved accuracies equal to 83%, 82%, and 86% of participants' own two-week test-retest consistency benchmark, respectively, compared with 74% for demographics-only agents. Combining interviews and surveys produced the highest accuracy, though gains over either source alone were modest, suggesting that predictive benefits from data begin to asymptote once the model has observed sufficient evidence within a domain. We find that these agents also predict personality traits, economic-game behavior, and experimental responses, while reducing accuracy disparities across racial and ideological groups relative to demographics-only agents. Together, these results show that LLM agents grounded in qualitative or quantitative self-reports can support general-purpose simulation of individuals across outcomes, without requiring task-specific training data.

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From Role to Person: Trust Calibration Challenges in Twin Agents

cs.HC · 2026-05-19 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0

Twin agents as personal digital representations create distinct trust calibration challenges because they dissolve the boundary between AI and human decision-makers, unlike existing frameworks designed for clear separation.

How Well Do Large Language Models Capture Human Personality?

cs.HC · 2026-05-12 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0

Richer persona descriptions in LLMs cause systematic contraction of representational and behavioral diversity, with simple age-gender prompts outperforming complex ideal customer profiles in downstream accuracy.

Text-Based Personas for Simulating User Privacy Decisions

cs.CR · 2026-03-20 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0

Narriva generates behavior-grounded text personas from survey data that achieve up to 87% accuracy in predicting privacy decisions, improve 6-17 points over baselines, cut tokens by 80-95%, and reproduce aggregate distributions across different studies.

Simulating Human Memory with Language Models

cs.CL · 2026-05-25 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

Language models show superior memory to humans on psych experiments but can be adjusted via prompting and compaction to forget more human-like, yielding better user simulators.

PrivacySIM: Evaluating LLM Simulation of User Privacy Behavior

cs.CR · 2026-05-12 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

PrivacySIM shows that conditioning LLMs on user personas like demographics and attitudes improves simulation of privacy choices but reaches only 40.4% accuracy against real responses from 1,000 users.

Post-training makes large language models less human-like

cs.CL · 2026-05-08 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

Post-training reduces LLMs' behavioral alignment with humans across families and sizes, with the misalignment increasing in newer generations while persona induction fails to improve individual-level predictions.

The Collapse of Heterogeneity in Silicon Philosophers

cs.CY · 2026-04-26 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

Large language models collapse philosophical heterogeneity by over-correlating judgments across domains, creating artificial consensus unlike the views of 277 professional philosophers.

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