From Heard to Lived Opinions: Simulating Opinion Dynamics with Grounded LLM Agents in Economic Environments
This addresses the need for more realistic opinion dynamics models in social science, though it is incremental by adding environmental grounding to existing LLM-based approaches.
The paper tackled the problem of simulating opinion dynamics by grounding LLM-based agents in an economic environment to incorporate lived experiences, showing that adverse conditions increase opinion rigidity and inequality amplifies polarization.
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.