Simulating Human Behavior with the Psychological-mechanism Agent: Integrating Feeling, Thought, and Action

ACL ARR 2025 February Submission7465 Authors

Abstract: Generative agents have made significant progress in simulating human behavior, but existing frameworks often simplify emotional modeling and focus primarily on specific tasks, limiting the authenticity of the simulation. This paper proposes the Psychological-mechanism Agent (PSYA) framework, based on the Cognitive Triangle (Feeling-Thought-Action), designed to more accurately simulate human behavior. The PSYA consists of three core modules: the Feeling module (using a layer model of affect to simulate changes in short-term, medium-term, and long-term emotions), the Thought module (based on the Triple Network Model to support goal-directed and spontaneous thinking), and the Action module (optimizing agent behavior through the integration of emotions, needs and plans). To evaluate the framework’s effectiveness, we conducted daily life simulations and extended the evaluation metrics to self-influence, one-influence, and group-influence, selecting five classic psychological experiments for simulation. The results show that the PSYA framework generates more natural, consistent, diverse, and credible behaviors, successfully replicating human experimental outcomes. Our work provides a richer and more accurate emotional and cognitive modeling approach for generative agents and offers an alternative to human participants in psychological experiments.

Paper Type: Long

Research Area: Linguistic theories, Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics

Research Area Keywords: cognitive modeling

Contribution Types: NLP engineering experiment

Languages Studied: English

Submission Number: 7465