Who Do LLMs Trust? Human Experts Matter More Than Other LLMs

Fuente: arXiv
Enregistré dans:
Détails bibliographiques
Auteurs principaux: Bajaj, Anooshka, Tiganj, Zoran
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
Sujets:
Accès en ligne:
Tags: Ajouter un tag
Pas de tags, Soyez le premier à ajouter un tag!
_version_ 1866915798387261440
author Bajaj, Anooshka
Tiganj, Zoran
author_facet Bajaj, Anooshka
Tiganj, Zoran
contents Large language models (LLMs) increasingly operate in environments where they encounter social information such as other agents' answers, tool outputs, or human recommendations. In humans, such inputs influence judgments in ways that depend on the source's credibility and the strength of consensus. This paper investigates whether LLMs exhibit analogous patterns of influence and whether they privilege feedback from humans over feedback from other LLMs. Across three binary decision-making tasks, reading comprehension, multi-step reasoning, and moral judgment, we present four instruction-tuned LLMs with prior responses attributed either to friends, to human experts, or to other LLMs. We manipulate whether the group is correct and vary the group size. In a second experiment, we introduce direct disagreement between a single human and a single LLM. Across tasks, models conform significantly more to responses labeled as coming from human experts, including when that signal is incorrect, and revise their answers toward experts more readily than toward other LLMs. These results reveal that expert framing acts as a strong prior for contemporary LLMs, suggesting a form of credibility-sensitive social influence that generalizes across decision domains.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_13568
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Who Do LLMs Trust? Human Experts Matter More Than Other LLMs
Bajaj, Anooshka
Tiganj, Zoran
Artificial Intelligence
Large language models (LLMs) increasingly operate in environments where they encounter social information such as other agents' answers, tool outputs, or human recommendations. In humans, such inputs influence judgments in ways that depend on the source's credibility and the strength of consensus. This paper investigates whether LLMs exhibit analogous patterns of influence and whether they privilege feedback from humans over feedback from other LLMs. Across three binary decision-making tasks, reading comprehension, multi-step reasoning, and moral judgment, we present four instruction-tuned LLMs with prior responses attributed either to friends, to human experts, or to other LLMs. We manipulate whether the group is correct and vary the group size. In a second experiment, we introduce direct disagreement between a single human and a single LLM. Across tasks, models conform significantly more to responses labeled as coming from human experts, including when that signal is incorrect, and revise their answers toward experts more readily than toward other LLMs. These results reveal that expert framing acts as a strong prior for contemporary LLMs, suggesting a form of credibility-sensitive social influence that generalizes across decision domains.
title Who Do LLMs Trust? Human Experts Matter More Than Other LLMs
topic Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13568