about
Large Language Models Do Not Simulate Human Psychology (arxiv.org)
1 point by Anon84 on Aug 13, 2025 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Chatbot answers were compared with human responses to test whether chatbots can replace people in psychology studies. Small wording changes that shift meaning caused big gaps between them, even for a model trained on psychology answers, so each use must be checked against humans.

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs),such as ChatGPT, are increasingly used in research, ranging from simple writing assistance to complex data annotation tasks. Recently, some research has suggested that LLMs may even be able to simulate human psychology and can, hence, replace human participants in psychological studies. We caution against this approach. We provide conceptual arguments against the hypothesis that LLMs simulate human psychology. We then present empiric evidence illustrating our arguments by demonstrating that slight changes to wording that correspond to large changes in meaning lead to notable discrepancies between LLMs' and human responses, even for the recent CENTAUR model that was specifically fine-tuned on psychological responses. Additionally, different LLMs show very different responses to novel items, further illustrating their lack of reliability. We conclude that LLMs do not simulate human psychology and recommend that psychological researchers should treat LLMs as useful but fundamentally unreliable tools that need to be validated against human responses for every new application.

Sarah Schröder, Thekla Morgenroth, Ulrike Kuhl, Valerie Vaquet, Benjamin Paaßen
arXiv:2508.06950 · cs.AI · submitted Aug 9, 2025 · updated Aug 13, 2025
abstract · pdf · html

add comment on HN