Simulating Society Requires Simulating Thought

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Li, Chance Jiajie, Wu, Jiayi, Mo, Zhenze, Qu, Ao, Tang, Yuhan, Zhao, Kaiya Ivy, Gan, Yulu, Fan, Jie, Yu, Jiangbo, Zhao, Jinhua, Liang, Paul, Alonso, Luis, Larson, Kent
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Li, Chance Jiajie
Wu, Jiayi
Mo, Zhenze
Qu, Ao
Tang, Yuhan
Zhao, Kaiya Ivy
Gan, Yulu
Fan, Jie
Yu, Jiangbo
Zhao, Jinhua
Liang, Paul
Alonso, Luis
Larson, Kent
author_facet Li, Chance Jiajie
Wu, Jiayi
Mo, Zhenze
Qu, Ao
Tang, Yuhan
Zhao, Kaiya Ivy
Gan, Yulu
Fan, Jie
Yu, Jiangbo
Zhao, Jinhua
Liang, Paul
Alonso, Luis
Larson, Kent
contents Simulating society with large language models (LLMs), we argue, requires more than generating plausible behavior; it demands cognitively grounded reasoning that is structured, revisable, and traceable. LLM-based agents are increasingly used to emulate individual and group behavior, primarily through prompting and supervised fine-tuning. Yet current simulations remain grounded in a behaviorist "demographics in, behavior out" paradigm, focusing on surface-level plausibility. As a result, they often lack internal coherence, causal reasoning, and belief traceability, making them unreliable for modeling how people reason, deliberate, and respond to interventions. To address this, we present a conceptual modeling paradigm, Generative Minds (GenMinds), which draws from cognitive science to support structured belief representations in generative agents. To evaluate such agents, we introduce the RECAP (REconstructing CAusal Paths) framework, a benchmark designed to assess reasoning fidelity via causal traceability, demographic grounding, and intervention consistency. These contributions advance a broader shift: from surface-level mimicry to generative agents that simulate thought, not just language, for social simulations.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_06958
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Simulating Society Requires Simulating Thought
Li, Chance Jiajie
Wu, Jiayi
Mo, Zhenze
Qu, Ao
Tang, Yuhan
Zhao, Kaiya Ivy
Gan, Yulu
Fan, Jie
Yu, Jiangbo
Zhao, Jinhua
Liang, Paul
Alonso, Luis
Larson, Kent
Computers and Society
Artificial Intelligence
Multiagent Systems
Simulating society with large language models (LLMs), we argue, requires more than generating plausible behavior; it demands cognitively grounded reasoning that is structured, revisable, and traceable. LLM-based agents are increasingly used to emulate individual and group behavior, primarily through prompting and supervised fine-tuning. Yet current simulations remain grounded in a behaviorist "demographics in, behavior out" paradigm, focusing on surface-level plausibility. As a result, they often lack internal coherence, causal reasoning, and belief traceability, making them unreliable for modeling how people reason, deliberate, and respond to interventions. To address this, we present a conceptual modeling paradigm, Generative Minds (GenMinds), which draws from cognitive science to support structured belief representations in generative agents. To evaluate such agents, we introduce the RECAP (REconstructing CAusal Paths) framework, a benchmark designed to assess reasoning fidelity via causal traceability, demographic grounding, and intervention consistency. These contributions advance a broader shift: from surface-level mimicry to generative agents that simulate thought, not just language, for social simulations.
title Simulating Society Requires Simulating Thought
topic Computers and Society
Artificial Intelligence
Multiagent Systems
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.06958