The High Cost of Incivility: Quantifying Interaction Inefficiency via Multi-Agent Monte Carlo Simulations
This addresses the challenge of measuring social friction's impact on efficiency in corporate and academic settings, offering an ethical alternative to human-subject research.
The study tackled the problem of quantifying how workplace toxicity affects operational efficiency by simulating adversarial debates using LLM-based multi-agent systems with Monte Carlo methods, finding that toxic participants increased conversation duration by approximately 25%.
Workplace toxicity is widely recognized as detrimental to organizational culture, yet quantifying its direct impact on operational efficiency remains methodologically challenging due to the ethical and practical difficulties of reproducing conflict in human subjects. This study leverages Large Language Model (LLM) based Multi-Agent Systems to simulate 1-on-1 adversarial debates, creating a controlled "sociological sandbox". We employ a Monte Carlo method to simulate hundrets of discussions, measuring the convergence time (defined as the number of arguments required to reach a conclusion) between a baseline control group and treatment groups involving agents with "toxic" system prompts. Our results demonstrate a statistically significant increase of approximately 25\% in the duration of conversations involving toxic participants. We propose that this "latency of toxicity" serves as a proxy for financial damage in corporate and academic settings. Furthermore, we demonstrate that agent-based modeling provides a reproducible, ethical alternative to human-subject research for measuring the mechanics of social friction.