polarizing social networks of LLMs
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Kevin Dorst
Dec 10, 2025, 10:03:14 AM12/10/25
to Human Cooperation Lab
Have people seen this paper?
I learned about it from Adam Bear. On a quick read, it seems super interesting, and maybe relevant to folks here. Anyone else read it and have hot takes for me?
Kevin
Emergence of human-like polarization among large language model agents
Jinghua Piao, Zhihong Lu, Chen Gao, Fengli Xu, Qinghua Hu, Fernando P. Santos, Yong Li, James Evans
Rapid advances in large language models (LLMs) have not only empowered autonomous agents to generate social networks, communicate, and form shared and diverging opinions on political issues, but have also begun to play a growing role in shaping human political deliberation. Our understanding of their collective behaviours and underlying mechanisms remains incomplete, however, posing unexpected risks to human society. In this paper, we simulate a networked system involving thousands of large language model agents, discovering their social interactions, guided through LLM conversation, result in human-like polarization. We discover that these agents spontaneously develop their own social network with human-like properties, including homophilic clustering, but also shape their collective opinions through mechanisms observed in the real world, including the echo chamber effect. Similarities between humans and LLM agents -- encompassing behaviours, mechanisms, and emergent phenomena -- raise concerns about their capacity to amplify societal polarization, but also hold the potential to serve as a valuable testbed for identifying plausible strategies to mitigate polarization and its consequences.
Jinghua Piao, Zhihong Lu, Chen Gao, Fengli Xu, Qinghua Hu, Fernando P. Santos, Yong Li, James Evans
Rapid advances in large language models (LLMs) have not only empowered autonomous agents to generate social networks, communicate, and form shared and diverging opinions on political issues, but have also begun to play a growing role in shaping human political deliberation. Our understanding of their collective behaviours and underlying mechanisms remains incomplete, however, posing unexpected risks to human society. In this paper, we simulate a networked system involving thousands of large language model agents, discovering their social interactions, guided through LLM conversation, result in human-like polarization. We discover that these agents spontaneously develop their own social network with human-like properties, including homophilic clustering, but also shape their collective opinions through mechanisms observed in the real world, including the echo chamber effect. Similarities between humans and LLM agents -- encompassing behaviours, mechanisms, and emergent phenomena -- raise concerns about their capacity to amplify societal polarization, but also hold the potential to serve as a valuable testbed for identifying plausible strategies to mitigate polarization and its consequences.
Bear, Adam
Dec 10, 2025, 10:40:31 AM12/10/25
to Kevin Dorst, Human Cooperation Lab
I learned about it from Nat in the lab!
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