From Blueprint to Reality: Modeling and Applying Putnam's Social Capital Theory with LLM-based Multi-agent Simulations
Putnam's Social Capital Theory is a foundational framework for collective action and community prosperity. However, traditional empirical methods face practical limits on control and replication. Meanwhile, LLM-based social simulations are typically behavior-driven and lack theory-aligned environments for modeling Putnam's core propositions. To address these gaps, we introduce SocaSim, an LLM-based multi-agent simulation framework to study Putnam's Social Capital Theory from theoretical blueprint to simulated reality. Specifically, we build an environment integrating social network evolution, trust dynamics, and norm propagation, where agents engage in repeated collective-action experimen...
| Authors | Shiyi Ling, Zhi Zheng, Hui Zheng et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 7 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 7 July 2026 |
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