LLMs Can't Handle Peer Pressure: Crumbling under Multi-Agent Social Interactions

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Song, Maojia, Pala, Tej Deep, Zhou, Ruiwen, Jin, Weisheng, Zadeh, Amir, Li, Chuan, Herremans, Dorien, Poria, Soujanya
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Song, Maojia
Pala, Tej Deep
Zhou, Ruiwen
Jin, Weisheng
Zadeh, Amir
Li, Chuan
Herremans, Dorien
Poria, Soujanya
author_facet Song, Maojia
Pala, Tej Deep
Zhou, Ruiwen
Jin, Weisheng
Zadeh, Amir
Li, Chuan
Herremans, Dorien
Poria, Soujanya
contents Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into multi-agent systems (MAS), where peer interactions shape individual decisions. While prior work has mainly examined conformity bias, we broaden the view to include how LLMs build rapport from prior interactions, discern and integrate high-quality peer information, and resist misleading inputs-abilities essential for achieving collective intelligence under complex social dynamics. We introduce KAIROS, a benchmark that simulates quiz-style collaboration with peer agents whose rapport levels and behaviours can be precisely controlled in both historical interactions and the current round. This unified setup enables systematic analysis of how rapport, peer actions, and the model's self-confidence jointly influence decision-making. Using KAIROS, we evaluate prompting, supervised fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning via Group Relative Policy Optimisation (GRPO). Results show that model scale is a primary factor moderating susceptibility to social influence: larger models are more resilient and benefit from prompting-based mitigation, whereas smaller models remain vulnerable. Only carefully configured GRPO training yields consistent robustness and performance gains for small models.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_18321
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle LLMs Can't Handle Peer Pressure: Crumbling under Multi-Agent Social Interactions
Song, Maojia
Pala, Tej Deep
Zhou, Ruiwen
Jin, Weisheng
Zadeh, Amir
Li, Chuan
Herremans, Dorien
Poria, Soujanya
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into multi-agent systems (MAS), where peer interactions shape individual decisions. While prior work has mainly examined conformity bias, we broaden the view to include how LLMs build rapport from prior interactions, discern and integrate high-quality peer information, and resist misleading inputs-abilities essential for achieving collective intelligence under complex social dynamics. We introduce KAIROS, a benchmark that simulates quiz-style collaboration with peer agents whose rapport levels and behaviours can be precisely controlled in both historical interactions and the current round. This unified setup enables systematic analysis of how rapport, peer actions, and the model's self-confidence jointly influence decision-making. Using KAIROS, we evaluate prompting, supervised fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning via Group Relative Policy Optimisation (GRPO). Results show that model scale is a primary factor moderating susceptibility to social influence: larger models are more resilient and benefit from prompting-based mitigation, whereas smaller models remain vulnerable. Only carefully configured GRPO training yields consistent robustness and performance gains for small models.
title LLMs Can't Handle Peer Pressure: Crumbling under Multi-Agent Social Interactions
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.18321