The Agentic Garden of Forking Paths
Empirical research rarely admits a unique analysis. Different analytical choices can lead to different conclusions from the same data, yet these hidden forking paths are difficult to observe. We show that AI agents capture much of the analytical variation among human researchers while making these paths explicit. Across four high-stakes domains, assigning different personas is sufficient for AI agents to report divergent, often opposing, conclusions from the same data and question, with findings systematically aligned with those beliefs. In a study in which 42 human research teams analyzed the same immigration dataset, AI agents reproduced 72% of the human ideological gap in reported effe...
| Authors | Jiacheng Miao, Jonathan K Pritchard, James Zou |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 1 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 1 July 2026 |
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