Large Language Models Assume People are More Rational than We Really are

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Liu, Ryan, Geng, Jiayi, Peterson, Joshua C., Sucholutsky, Ilia, Griffiths, Thomas L.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866910865859543040
author Liu, Ryan
Geng, Jiayi
Peterson, Joshua C.
Sucholutsky, Ilia
Griffiths, Thomas L.
author_facet Liu, Ryan
Geng, Jiayi
Peterson, Joshua C.
Sucholutsky, Ilia
Griffiths, Thomas L.
contents In order for AI systems to communicate effectively with people, they must understand how we make decisions. However, people's decisions are not always rational, so the implicit internal models of human decision-making in Large Language Models (LLMs) must account for this. Previous empirical evidence seems to suggest that these implicit models are accurate -- LLMs offer believable proxies of human behavior, acting how we expect humans would in everyday interactions. However, by comparing LLM behavior and predictions to a large dataset of human decisions, we find that this is actually not the case: when both simulating and predicting people's choices, a suite of cutting-edge LLMs (GPT-4o & 4-Turbo, Llama-3-8B & 70B, Claude 3 Opus) assume that people are more rational than we really are. Specifically, these models deviate from human behavior and align more closely with a classic model of rational choice -- expected value theory. Interestingly, people also tend to assume that other people are rational when interpreting their behavior. As a consequence, when we compare the inferences that LLMs and people draw from the decisions of others using another psychological dataset, we find that these inferences are highly correlated. Thus, the implicit decision-making models of LLMs appear to be aligned with the human expectation that other people will act rationally, rather than with how people actually act.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_17055
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Large Language Models Assume People are More Rational than We Really are
Liu, Ryan
Geng, Jiayi
Peterson, Joshua C.
Sucholutsky, Ilia
Griffiths, Thomas L.
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Computers and Society
Machine Learning
In order for AI systems to communicate effectively with people, they must understand how we make decisions. However, people's decisions are not always rational, so the implicit internal models of human decision-making in Large Language Models (LLMs) must account for this. Previous empirical evidence seems to suggest that these implicit models are accurate -- LLMs offer believable proxies of human behavior, acting how we expect humans would in everyday interactions. However, by comparing LLM behavior and predictions to a large dataset of human decisions, we find that this is actually not the case: when both simulating and predicting people's choices, a suite of cutting-edge LLMs (GPT-4o & 4-Turbo, Llama-3-8B & 70B, Claude 3 Opus) assume that people are more rational than we really are. Specifically, these models deviate from human behavior and align more closely with a classic model of rational choice -- expected value theory. Interestingly, people also tend to assume that other people are rational when interpreting their behavior. As a consequence, when we compare the inferences that LLMs and people draw from the decisions of others using another psychological dataset, we find that these inferences are highly correlated. Thus, the implicit decision-making models of LLMs appear to be aligned with the human expectation that other people will act rationally, rather than with how people actually act.
title Large Language Models Assume People are More Rational than We Really are
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Computers and Society
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.17055