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Main Authors: Pratelli, Manuel, Petrocchi, Marinella
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.23610
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author Pratelli, Manuel
Petrocchi, Marinella
author_facet Pratelli, Manuel
Petrocchi, Marinella
contents Large language models (LLMs) make it possible to generate synthetic behavioural data at scale, offering an ethical and low-cost alternative to human experiments. Whether such data can faithfully capture psychological differences driven by personality traits, however, remains an open question. We evaluate the capacity of LLM agents, conditioned on Big-Five profiles, to reproduce personality-based variation in susceptibility to misinformation, focusing on news discernment, the ability to judge true headlines as true and false headlines as false. Leveraging published datasets in which human participants with known personality profiles rated headline accuracy, we create matching LLM agents and compare their responses to the original human patterns. Certain trait-misinformation associations, notably those involving Agreeableness and Conscientiousness, are reliably replicated, whereas others diverge, revealing systematic biases in how LLMs internalize and express personality. The results underscore both the promise and the limits of personality-aligned LLMs for behavioral simulation, and offer new insight into modeling cognitive diversity in artificial agents.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_23610
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Evaluating the Simulation of Human Personality-Driven Susceptibility to Misinformation with LLMs
Pratelli, Manuel
Petrocchi, Marinella
Computation and Language
Computers and Society
Large language models (LLMs) make it possible to generate synthetic behavioural data at scale, offering an ethical and low-cost alternative to human experiments. Whether such data can faithfully capture psychological differences driven by personality traits, however, remains an open question. We evaluate the capacity of LLM agents, conditioned on Big-Five profiles, to reproduce personality-based variation in susceptibility to misinformation, focusing on news discernment, the ability to judge true headlines as true and false headlines as false. Leveraging published datasets in which human participants with known personality profiles rated headline accuracy, we create matching LLM agents and compare their responses to the original human patterns. Certain trait-misinformation associations, notably those involving Agreeableness and Conscientiousness, are reliably replicated, whereas others diverge, revealing systematic biases in how LLMs internalize and express personality. The results underscore both the promise and the limits of personality-aligned LLMs for behavioral simulation, and offer new insight into modeling cognitive diversity in artificial agents.
title Evaluating the Simulation of Human Personality-Driven Susceptibility to Misinformation with LLMs
topic Computation and Language
Computers and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.23610