Can large language model agents simulate human trust behaviors?

Conference item

Large Language Model (LLM) agents have been increasingly adopted as simulation tools to model humans in applications such as social science. However, one fundamental question remains: can LLM agents really simulate human behaviors? In this paper, we focus on one of the most critical behaviors in human interactions, trust, and aim to investigate whether or not LLM agents can simulate human trust behaviors. We first find that LLM agents generally exhibit trust behaviors, referred to as agent trust, under the framework of Trust Games, which are widely recognized in behavioral economics. Then, we discover that LLM agents can have high behavioral alignment with humans regarding trust behaviors, particularly for GPT-4, indicating the feasibility to simulate human trust behaviors with LLM agents. In addition, we probe into the biases in agent trust and the differences in agent trust towards agents and humans. We also explore the intrinsic properties of agent trust under conditions including advanced reasoning strategies and external manipulations. We further offer important implications of our discoveries for various scenarios where trust is paramount. Our study provides new insights into the behaviors of LLM agents and the fundamental analogy between LLMs and humans.

Authors: Xie, C; Chen, C; Jia, F; Ye, Z; Shu, K

• Publication status: In press
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Curran Associates
• Host title: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37 (NeurIPS 2024)
• Journal: 37
• Pages: 15674--15729
• Publication date: 2025-02-01
• Acceptance date: 2023-10-09
• Event title: 38th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2024)
• Event location: Vancouver, Canada
• Event website: https://aaai.org/aaai-conference/
• Event start date: 2024-12-09
• Event end date: 2024-12-15
• ISSN: 1049-5258
• ISBN: 9798331314385
• Language: English
• Keywords: behavioral alignment; LLM agent; human simulation