Do LLMs Change Their Minds Like Humans? Diagnosing Human--LLM Divergence in Single-Turn Persuasion Judgments
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as proxies for human participants in social simulations, yet whether they update their beliefs in response to persuasive arguments, as humans do, remains poorly understood. We conduct a systematic comparison using a naturally occurring online persuasion corpus in which original posters explicitly verify whether a reply changed their view. Our results show that LLMs achieve only slight agreement with humans (Cohen's kappa ranging from 0.079 to 0.178). Content-level analyses show that humans and LLMs agree on the strongest persuasion cues but diverge on finer ones: humans are more swayed by novel content and assertive language, whereas ...
| Authors | Lin Chen, Yitong Chen, Yong Li |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CY |
| Published | 30 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 30 August 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.