Collective cooperation without individual fidelity in LLM agents
For researchers using LLMs as human proxies in social simulations, this shows that aggregate agreement is insufficient validation, requiring multi-level behavioral comparisons.
LLM agents in a networked Prisoner's Dilemma reproduce macro-level human cooperation patterns (early decline, later stabilization) but fail at micro-level individual heterogeneity and conditional cooperation, revealing a macro-micro dissociation.
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as agents in simulations of social systems, yet it remains unclear when their behavior can be interpreted as a faithful proxy for human decision-making. Here we test LLM agents against a direct empirical benchmark: a large-scale networked Prisoner's Dilemma experiment with human participants. Using the same interaction protocol, payoff structure, and network topologies, we compare nine open-weight LLMs with the human data. The selected model reproduces several macro-level features of cooperation dynamics, including the early decline and later stabilization of cooperation. This aggregate agreement, however, does not extend uniformly to finer levels of behavior. LLM populations underestimate individual-level heterogeneity and generate conditional cooperation patterns that differ from those observed in humans. Adding a fraction of random agents improves some aspects of micro-level agreement, but does not remove the mismatch in decision rules. These findings reveal a macro--micro dissociation in LLM-based social agents: collective outcomes can appear human-like even when the underlying behavioral distributions and mechanisms are not. They suggest that validating LLM agents as human surrogates requires comparisons across aggregate dynamics, individual heterogeneity, and context-dependent decision rules, rather than outcome-level agreement alone.