Language-model groups overstate consensus when replaying human deliberation on a reasoning task
Mirrored from arXiv — NLP / Computation & Language for archival readability. Support the source by reading on the original site.
Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence
Title:Language-model groups overstate consensus when replaying human deliberation on a reasoning task
Abstract:Full-consensus rates are often treated as indicators of collective cognition, yet depend on how participation and final states are operationalized. We replayed 100 held-out human Wason groups with matched large language model (LLM) agent groups, seeding one belief-anchored agent per participant's pre-discussion answer and scoring agents and people with the same code. Across human scoring definitions, estimates ranged from 24.0% to 57.0%; about one fifth of participants never posted, whereas agents almost always did. Agent groups remained more consensual in two post-unblinding sensitivity analyses: the submit-based comparison (n = 98) yielded gaps of 34.0 and 43.9 percentage points for chat and reasoning modes, and the participation-matched comparison (n = 45) yielded gaps of 34.1 and 44.4 points. These complementary routes reduced different measurement asymmetries yet converged within 0.5 percentage points. The gap persisted without early stopping and under a reparameterization removing the memorizable answer; reasoning-mode groups then agreed nearly unanimously, mostly on incorrect answers. Simulated consensus did not track collective accuracy, and belief-anchored agent groups were biased estimators of the human group-outcome distribution in this setting. These analyses provide a scoring-explicit basis for assessing simulated-group estimates of human deliberative outcomes.
| Comments: | 37 pages, 4 figures. Preregistration: this https URL . Code and data: this https URL |
| Subjects: | Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computation and Language (cs.CL); Computers and Society (cs.CY); Multiagent Systems (cs.MA) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2609.20543 [cs.AI] |
| (or arXiv:2609.20543v1 [cs.AI] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.20543
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
|
Access Paper:
- View PDF
Current browse context:
References & Citations
Bookmark
Bibliographic and Citation Tools
Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article
Demos
Recommenders and Search Tools
arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators
arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.
Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.
Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.
More from arXiv — NLP / Computation & Language
-
A Mechanistic Study of AI-Text Detection Neurons in Frozen BERT: Sparse Probing and Activation Patching on RAID
Sep 28
-
Manifold Projection and Iterative Autoencoder Refinement for Masked Language Modeling
Sep 28
-
Not All Memories Are Equal: Hierarchical Collaborative Memory for Validity-Aware Retrieval in LLM Agents
Sep 28
-
Auditing and Repairing LLM-as-Judge Failures in a Production Text-to-SQL Pipeline
Sep 28
Discussion (0)
Sign in to join the discussion. Free account, 30 seconds — email code or GitHub.
Sign in →No comments yet. Sign in and be the first to say something.