Pith. sign in

REVIEW 5 cited by

Large Language Models Assume People are More Rational than We Really are

Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.

This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.

SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event

T0 review · schema-true

One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.

pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp

arxiv 2406.17055 v4 pith:BCQV572R submitted 2024-06-24 cs.CL cs.AIcs.CYcs.LG

classification cs.CLcs.AIcs.CYcs.LG
keywords peoplemodelshumanllmsrationalbehaviordecisionsassume
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal

Signed reviews

No signed human review yet.

0 comments
read the original abstract

In order for AI systems to communicate effectively with people, they must understand how we make decisions. However, people's decisions are not always rational, so the implicit internal models of human decision-making in Large Language Models (LLMs) must account for this. Previous empirical evidence seems to suggest that these implicit models are accurate -- LLMs offer believable proxies of human behavior, acting how we expect humans would in everyday interactions. However, by comparing LLM behavior and predictions to a large dataset of human decisions, we find that this is actually not the case: when both simulating and predicting people's choices, a suite of cutting-edge LLMs (GPT-4o & 4-Turbo, Llama-3-8B & 70B, Claude 3 Opus) assume that people are more rational than we really are. Specifically, these models deviate from human behavior and align more closely with a classic model of rational choice -- expected value theory. Interestingly, people also tend to assume that other people are rational when interpreting their behavior. As a consequence, when we compare the inferences that LLMs and people draw from the decisions of others using another psychological dataset, we find that these inferences are highly correlated. Thus, the implicit decision-making models of LLMs appear to be aligned with the human expectation that other people will act rationally, rather than with how people actually act.

Discussion (0). Continue with ORCID to comment.

Forward citations

Cited by 5 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. Will Scaling Improve Social Simulation with LLMs?

    cs.CL 2026-07 conditional novelty 7.0 of 10

    Using 85 controlled and 35 public LLMs, the authors show social-simulation accuracy generally improves with compute, but some behavioral and low-resource tasks do not scale.

  2. Recovering Event Probabilities from Large Language Model Embeddings via Axiomatic Constraints

    cs.CL 2025-05 conditional novelty 7.0 of 10

    A sign-flip constraint on one latent dimension of a VAE trained on LLM embeddings yields complementary event probabilities that sum to near one and track true probabilities on held-out dice events.

  3. Are Large Language Models Reliable AI Scientists? Assessing Reverse-Engineering of Black-Box Systems

    cs.LG 2025-05 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    LLMs struggle to use passive observations for reverse engineering, but active intervention improves performance, largely through the process of generating queries rather than the data obtained.

  4. Steering Risk Preferences in Large Language Models by Aligning Behavioral and Neural Representations

    cs.CL 2025-05 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Behavioral and neural representations of risk are aligned via regression to produce steering vectors that reliably shift LLM risk preferences across tasks.

  5. Revisiting Rogers' Paradox in the Context of Human-AI Interaction

    cs.AI 2025-01 conditional novelty 4.0 of 10

    A simulation of Rogers' Paradox with an AI agent that learns the population average shows that cheap AI alone does not improve collective world understanding, while critical appraisal and independent AI learning can.

Pith tools