Evaluating LLM Agent Group Dynamics against Human Group Dynamics: A Case Study on Wisdom of Partisan Crowds

Yun-Shiuan Chuang, Siddharth Suresh, Nikunj Harlalka, Agam Goyal, Robert Hawkins, Sijia Yang, Dhavan Shah, Junjie Hu, Timothy T. Rogers

Abstract: This study investigates the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) to simulate human group dynamics, particularly within politically charged contexts. We replicate the Wisdom of Partisan Crowds phenomenon using LLMs to role-play as Democrat and Republican personas, engaging in a structured interaction akin to human group study. Our approach evaluates how agents' responses evolve through social influence. Our key findings indicate that LLM agents role-playing detailed personas and without Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning closely align with human behaviors, while having CoT reasoning hurts the alignment. However, incorporating explicit biases into agent prompts does not necessarily enhance the wisdom of partisan crowds. Moreover, fine-tuning LLMs with human data shows promise in achieving human-like behavior but poses a risk of overfitting certain behaviors. These findings show the potential and limitations of using LLM agents in modeling human group phenomena.