89.1SOC-PHMar 17
From Heard to Lived Opinions: Simulating Opinion Dynamics with Grounded LLM Agents in Economic EnvironmentsRyuji Hashimoto, Masahiro Kaneko, Ryosuke Takata et al.
Opinion dynamics (OD) studies how individual opinions evolve and generate collective patterns such as consensus and polarization. While recent work explores OD using populations of LLM-based agents focusing on opinion exchange, it typically does not incorporate individuals' lived experiences, such as economic outcomes of past decisions, which play a critical role in shaping opinions. We propose a novel OD simulation framework that grounds LLM-based agents in an economic environment, allowing them to act and receive environmental feedback. Our simulations exhibit coherent OD at both individual and population levels: individual opinions follow structured trajectories shaped by economic experiences, with adverse conditions inducing opinion rigidity, while at the population level, collective opinions co-move with economic conditions, with inequality amplifying polarization and price instability driving larger distributional shifts. These results highlight the importance of grounding LLM-based agents in environments to capture collective OD.
HCFeb 20, 2025
The Impact and Feasibility of Self-Confidence Shaping for AI-Assisted Decision-MakingTakehiro Takayanagi, Ryuji Hashimoto, Chung-Chi Chen et al.
In AI-assisted decision-making, it is crucial but challenging for humans to appropriately rely on AI, especially in high-stakes domains such as finance and healthcare. This paper addresses this problem from a human-centered perspective by presenting an intervention for self-confidence shaping, designed to calibrate self-confidence at a targeted level. We first demonstrate the impact of self-confidence shaping by quantifying the upper-bound improvement in human-AI team performance. Our behavioral experiments with 121 participants show that self-confidence shaping can improve human-AI team performance by nearly 50% by mitigating both over- and under-reliance on AI. We then introduce a self-confidence prediction task to identify when our intervention is needed. Our results show that simple machine-learning models achieve 67% accuracy in predicting self-confidence. We further illustrate the feasibility of such interventions. The observed relationship between sentiment and self-confidence suggests that modifying sentiment could be a viable strategy for shaping self-confidence. Finally, we outline future research directions to support the deployment of self-confidence shaping in a real-world scenario for effective human-AI collaboration.