Collective cooperation without individual fidelity in LLM agents
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as agents in simulations of social systems, yet it remains unclear when their behavior can be interpreted as a faithful proxy for human decision-making. Here we test LLM agents against a direct empirical benchmark: a large-scale networked Prisoner's Dilemma experiment with human participants. Using the same interaction protocol, payoff structure, and network topologies, we compare nine open-weight LLMs with the human data. The selected model reproduces several macro-level features of cooperation dynamics, including the early decline and later stabilization of cooperation. This aggregate agreement, however, does not extend uniformly to fin...
| Authors | Henrique Ferraz de Arruda, Carlos Gracia Lázaro, Alberto Aleta et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | physics.soc-ph |
| Published | 29 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 29 June 2026 |
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